Market research

There are two different types of research: Primary and secondary. Primary research is up to date research that you have carried out yourself. For example questionnaires, face to face opinions, ringing someone on the phone to ask their views.










Secondary research is formally known as desktop research because you can acquire it all from the comfort of your desk on the Internet. It is data that has been collected by somebody else that you have access too, either for free or at a price.



Both types of researches have their advantages. Primary research is very up to date, you can acquire the exact data you want to because you are asking the questions, you can include as many people that you want in your research and you know the data is defiantly reliable because you have got it yourself.

Secondary research also has its advantages: A huge range of data is available, you can analyse trends in the market because you can get data that has been analysed over many years, it is cheap and it is easily accessible.

Myself and Blaine have to produce a five minute short film as well as two of the three subsidiary tasks. We have chosen to make a poster promoting the film and a review of the film that will be placed within a magazine. We have chosen to drop the radio advert for our short film as this doesn't interest both of us and it would be very menial to then find out lots of information that we are not passionate about.
All three tasks that need to be completed require vast amounts of research both primary and secondary, we will have to look at existing short films, film posters and reviews in order to get a rough idea of what we want to include within our products, then what is the best way to then construct our products always referring to our research on target audience and what they would both expect within the products as well as what they would like to see.

I was researching classification for short films because I wanted to find out whether the classification rules and regulations that are applied to a feature length film are the same for a short film. I found out that the same rules apply and whilst I was on the BBFC ( British board of film classification) website I found some very useful information for our film poster.

'The Video Recordings Act (Labelling) Regulations 1985 state the letter or number (U, PG, 12, 15, 18, R18) within the triangle, circle or square must be no less than 5mm in size. The size refers to the letter or number and does not include any shadow or other design elements'

This is just a small part of our poster but we have to be law abiding so this information is very useful and is just a small example of how desktop research can be very helpful.