Target Audience Feedback On Idea // Pre-Production

Target Audience: Teenagers and Young Adults

After pitching our idea we soon realised we hadn't got any proper audience feedback from the audience we pitched to. Because of this it meant we each had to carry out our own audience research. I contacted several teenagers and young adults and these were their views overall:

Positives:
    - Good idea.
    - Can create something that's quite plausible and realistic .
    - There are lots of moments when you can get jumps in, which is good.
    - The curse idea is great, it suggests bad omens and maybe that the estate agent has done something to upset the antagonist.
    - The idea of having a young girl as the supernatural being is really effective because in horror stories children are always terrifying.
    - Good location as it's quite eerie and in the middle of no where so it's ordinary and makes people wonder if the situation would happen to them making it more realistic.
    - Good, interesting storyline (classic supernatural horror idea).
    - Estate agent is quite good as she's ordinary.

Negatives:
    - A bit predictable.
    - There are no unexpected plot twists so the ending may be obvious.
    - Teenagers may struggle to relate to the estate agent because she's professional and older.

Developments:
    - Instead of having an estate agent you could have a character that's very similar to the target audience, but then again it is difficult to place a character in an empty house without it being somehow related to the business side of things.
    - Maybe it could have one feature that makes it stand out from the other horror stories so people would really want to go and see it at the cinema.
    - You could advertise a back story for the antagonist, or the estate agent could be related to her in some way or linked to her death.

From this feedback I can see we have quite a few good ideas but some negatives and possible developments.

As we are doing a supernatural horror and want to follow the codes and conventions of it we are happy for the storyline to seem a little predictable as it means it's more likely for teenagers and young adults to like it as it's not completely different to normal supernatural horrors. I understand how teenagers may not be able to relate so well to the estate agent however young adults are likely to and as one member of our target audience said it would be hard to place a person in an empty house without it being related to something to do with business.

I found the developments about having a unique feature and advertising things about the antagonist interesting. Unfortunately, for this project we are not going into advertise our film so we can't develop it in that way. We have, however, decided to include some writing with a bit of a back story at the start so people are introduced to the story and given some context. We also hope that the name 'Malediction' would entice people to see it enough as it's such an unusual word and people will want to know what it means and how it relates to the story.