Focus group

A pilot thriller is a prototype, an opportunity to investigate the finished product before production begins. It is also to test the product on the audience and see what they have to say.

We did a focus group in class where we showed our pilot thriller to the rest of the class to see what feedback they could give:

We had mixed reviews throughout the showing but over all they liked it except for the ending.

For the ballet sequence they loved the elegance of it but 13/13 people in the class felt it went on for a little too long. I think this is something we cannot change because we need this sequence to be long enough to show the credits, but it can be improved if we were to make the music more thrilling as it was at the beginning we could also include some more interesting shots to keep the audience interested.The focus group were all girls which is slightly biased because if we showed it to boys they may have a different opinion as they may not be so keen on the ballet bit and they could give us advice to make it more interesting. We did however have Phil our teacher with us and he thought when we come to shoot the real thing we should hardly see the ballerinas face, we should just concentrate on close ups of her feet and arms as this is where the tension of her dance lies. The ballerina in this scene will not be our main character but naturally the person from the focus group thought she was. If we go with Phil's idea about close ups which means we will hardly see her face this will hopefully suggest she is not a main character. Personally I have seen films which open with characters who end up not playing a big role in the film even so I see where the focus group are coming from. In some ways it may be a good idea to make the audience think she is a main character and then when she gets killed early on the audience will be surprised and recognise our movie as a thriller which is going to be shocking. Lastly, people felt that our thriller looked like two different movies due to the abrupt change in music and the whole point is, is that we want the two to flow together otherwise the whole idea of having the start of the movie wont work, and idea suggested to solve this problem was to cross-cut between the ballerina and the car chase to create a good contrast, but the issue would be what music to use that is appropriate to both scenes. 
It was clear that the focus group really did not like the way we filmed the car scene which I agree with. They liked the concept of the car scene, said that it would be too difficult to film it to the standard it would need to be filmed at for it to be effective which we agreed with so we decided to alter the idea a little. We presented the idea about the crime scene office as an alternative to the car. Now we are moving forward with the office scene idea and we are currently casting our actors and looking at set design.