Audience focus group

The focus group consist of a group of our classmates and, as a group, we shared our ideas for our two minuet TV opening sequence. Our group recorded whilst we shared our ideas and received feedback from our classmates. Some of these feedback helped us to develop our ideas and to keep things simple and clear. 
The following quotes are from the focus group which are key quotes in developing our opening sequence:

• "The first part is going to be a montage of a 'previously' for a previous episode"
• "a car is coming at a fast speed and ends up hitting her"
• "next scene is also one-minuet" 
• "there's a lot of stuff"
• "on E4 for half an hour, everyday"
• "will it be at an actual party"
• "the main thing is guilt"
• "more appealing to women" 
• "the jealous girl is the protagonist"
• "doesn't have to appeal to a broad audience"
• "when you're doing the car bit, I think you don't need the car moving, I think if you have it still and you just turn the lights on and have a shot of her eyes and car light is in her eyes... instead of fading it just goes black for two seconds so people will question what happen is she dead?..."
• "no need to see the girl dead"
• "a well shot house party can be really effective"
• "the editing has to be very precise"
• "the key thing is planning"

From the discussion, I learned that our idea does not attract every particularly the male audience as someone stated that it is "more appealing to women." This will have an impact on our final product as we are left with the decision to either change the plot in order to get the male audience slightly more interested or make the plot attract the female audience even more as the production "doesn't have to appeal to a broad audience."

I also learned that our idea had a lot of drama and complex things involved which could be risky. Therefore, as a group we decided to simplify the plot. We also took on the idea that was given to us about the car scene which made it much easier to create an effective scene. 

Another thing was, the settings for our production had to look realistic as we were encouraged to film an actual house party when doing the party scene. 

Additionally, I learned that the key to making this production with all these big ideas work is planning and editing. When we are doing our final product we need to make sure we look back at our planning continuously and pay great attention to our editing. 

From our focus group and previous research we have come to a fair conclusion to who our target audience consist of.

The show will be on E4 at 5pm for half an hour every weekday. The E4 target audience is 16-34 year old people so it targets the younger audience. This would contain people of class D and E section. This would be students, unemployed or semi-skilled workers. Also they're likely to be mainstreamer's, explorers or struggler's. All of this fits well with what we expect our target audience to look like. 

They would be interested in TV shows such as Gossip Girl, and Waterloo Road. The newspapers they would read would be the Sun or the Daily Mail so that they can be up-to-date with the latest gossip. It would be mainly for the female gender. Overall our production would be a diversion for our target audience but also a personal identity because they could find themselves reflected by one of the characters.