MAIN Post 2: Choosing your Genre

There are plenty of different genres that we could choose to use in our opening sequence of our short film, but we need to find out more about different types of genres and what is the most popular.
The following research I undertook in order to help find out what the most popular genre is of fiction film:

Before finding out what the most popular genre is, I decided to remind myself of all the different genres that exist and that are used in producing short films, therefore I found the site below.
http://www.filmsite.org/genres.html
This site allows me to read about each genre in a little bit of depth, it gives information on 11 main genres from Drama and Action to War and Westerns.  

http://ddunlop.com/2010/01/recapping-2009-most-popular-movie-genre/
The link above shows the most popular genre in the year 2009, with the most popular genre being Comedy, followed by Action and Adventure then by Drama, this is shown from the chart below:

http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/media3.html

The link above gives information about the most popular genre, from the table below it shows the most popular genre is Drama with 30.7%, the second most popular is Action Adventure with 16.2%, followed by Romance with 12.4% and then Comedy with 10.5%.

From all the information found on other websites above, this has helped our group finalize a decision of what genre we are planning to use for our short film, but in order to be sure we carried out some more research into people's favourite genres.

Questionnaire

In our group we produced a short questionnaire in order to investigate and ask a range of people what their favourite genre is, what they expect from the opening sequence of a film and what type of genre they'd like to see more of.

Below is a copy of our questionnaire that we asked people to fill in for us:

From our questionnaires and after asking a range of ages our results are as follows:

1. From the results of this question the highest marked, therefore most popular from our results, was Drama with 14 and the second highest was Action with 11.

2. This was an open question therefore we got a lot of different responses ranging from interesting to tense and thrilling. However the most frequent answer for what they liked most about their chosen genre was for it to be funny. This answer came up 7 times in all the results, the next following popular answers with it appearing 3 times each was exciting and fast paced.

3. As well as question 2 this was also an open question so again we got a lot of different results. The question asked what would typically be involved in their chosen genre, the most popular answer was for it to be funny allowing for laughter from the audience. The next two popular were fighting and the storyline.

4. The fourth question was what makes a good opening sequence, the most frequent answer that came up in the results was the location and the second was the characters. This gives us an indication that these aspects of our opening sequence need to be of a good quality to please the audience.
5. From this question we found out that people go to on any day as the highest marked option was no specific day. Although if one day had to be chosen the results show us that Friday is the next most popular day to go to the cinema.
6. Following from the previous question, people tend to go to the cinema with their friends the most as this was the highest marked answer from the results. Second highest was with their partner, so this could give us an idea to film something that people will go to see with their freinds.

7. This question asked what genre people would like to see more of, the most popular response was drama, followed by comedy and horror.

As the genre drama was most popular we think as a group this would be a good route to go down as many people will enjoy seeing some form of drama in a new short film.