For further research and planning of our project we were required to create a questionnaire and gather results to find peoples preferred style of the thriller movie genre.


1). what do you think the best setting to the opening of a thriller movie?
A). City Centre (2)
B). Woodland (4)
C). Lakeside (2)

2). what time of day do you think is best for a thriller to be filmed?
A). Early Morning 7-11 AM (3)
B). Midday 12-1PM (0)
C). Late afternoon 4-9PM (2)
D). Late Night 10-12PM (3)


3). How many people should be in the opening to a thriller?

A). One (5)
B). Two (3)
C). Three Plus (0)


4). what do you think that character should be?

A). Antagonist (3)
B). Protagonist (5)


5). what should happen in the opening to a thriller?

A). Murder (1)
B). Stalking (2)
C). Mysterious (5)


6). should the opening reveal some of the plot?

A). Yes (5)
B). No (3)


7). should the opening of a thriller contain speech?

A). A little (3)
B). Yes (2)
C). No (0)
D). some in a sound bridge (3)




Our questionnaire was completed not only by students at the college but also older and younger people, the reason for this was to get a better overall view on people's perspective on the thriller genre, and what conventions people feel nessescary in the opening to a thriller

From the results of our questionnaire we are now able to show further research into our chosen genre, although some of our results did throw a few surprises.

From the results that we have received it can be concluded that dark and gloomy woodland would be the best location for the opening to a thriller movie, this is more or less the result that we expected from our audience, and this is beneficial for our planning, as we had planned to film in this kind of location creating a sense of mystery and tension amongst the audience.

With early morning and late night proving to be equally popular, this is one of the results that proved surprising, as both Sam and I felt that an early morning setting would not create enough tension and atmosphere required for our opening, and although late night would create thees conventions, it is extremely difficult to find light to film in at this time of days, and for those reasons we decided that late afternoon would be the best time for us to film.

The number of characters seen in a thriller opening had an unsurprising outcome, with the lesser numbers proving to be more popular, this is another convention that Sam and I thought would tie in with thriller conventions, and therefore decided to use a small number of characters (no more than 2)

The results show that the people we asked would prefer to see a protagonist rather than antagonist in the opening of a thriller, this is again surprising as our desired effect is tension and mystery, we want the audience to be able to familiarize with the antagonist as soon as possible. Due to the results we have decided to include both antagonist and protagonist in our opening sequence, this still keeps within our small number of characters convention.

The results also show that a mysterious opening, with little revealing to the actual plot proved the most populer, this ties in with the ideas that Sam and I have had about our production.