Survey Results: Focus Group

As well as a video we created an online survey to be filled out which gave us more specific responses on our ideas, rather than simply about the western genre in general.

Our first question was simply about gender to establish a better idea of our target audience. As this shows, it was mainly Males that answered, however the gap is not particularly large, meaning that there is no reason why we would need to adjust the films content in any way to cater to the expected content for either gender (the male gaze).

Our second question was for the same reason, and it shows that our primary target audience is 13-18 year olds. For this reason our film will have to be PG-13 rather than R rated, and will be required to conform to the standards of this rating, with minimal swearing and little to no gore.

 For the title, people have chosen A Bullet For Jesse Ringo over our other two possible titles, so this is the title we will use for our film. Initially we were going to use The Pursuit of Jesse Ringo by Marshal Bill Grieves, however in retrospect we believe that Bullet for Jesse Ringo is a better name and clearly more popular.

A debate we had within our group that may seem trivial but we still considered important to the film was the Law man's (Adrian's)facial hair. The grooming of a character is an important aspect of character and can be used to convey different meanings, clean shaven being a man who looks after himself or stubble to show a character that is less concerned with the way they look. Overwhelmingly, the results show that people where more in favour of the stubble, so this is what we will go with for the final piece.

This result is preferable as minimal speech is a Genre Convention of western films, and was our original idea. Whilst we may still make the opening silent to build up a sense of enigma and tension, the main law man would be portrayed as a man of few words.

We wanted to know what kind of villain people would prefer to see, and as shown it is a completely even split. for this reason, we have decided to make the villain responsible for committing all of these crimes, which would make him all the more dangerous and sinister.

Another debate we had amongst the group was what kind of law man the main character should be, a local sheriff, Pinkerton agent or U.S. Marshal. The Marshal proved to be the most popular, so this is the title we will give him in the film.

Overall, this survey has helped us to adjust and settle certain features based on popularity, Having the input of others means that we can include features for the sake of popularity rather than choosing only the ideas we like best and running only on artistic direction.