FOCUS GROUP
To prove a part of my hypothesis I decided to run a focus group based on general public’s opinion of the movie, and how it is affected by the book. I had two groups of five people in each (17-30 years old). The first group watched a short film first and then read the short story that the film was based off, while the second group read the story first and then watched the film. The short story I used was Roddy Doyle’s “New Boy” and its adaptation by Steph Green. The results I gathered were revealing. First of all, the group that started with reading finished much earlier than the one that started with watching the movie, and as everyone had confirmed, reading after watching was tedious. The group that read the story first came out to have very high expectations of the movie and 90% of the survey takers disliked the cast chosen by the director. This group, however, loved the change that the filmmakers brought to the adaptation and said that it added both sense and background to the original plot. However the second group, which watched the movie first, loved the cast and was impressed with their acting skills and couldn’t detach themselves from the visualized characters while reading the story. It also hasn’t noticed the plot add up that the first group loved so much (most likely because it appeared in their head so clear that they didn’t recognize that it was not in the original text). A small sample size of viewers and a short story was enough for me to prove that the viewer is extremely biased by the book and has really high expectations of what (s)he is going to see; however, (s)he is satisfied and even excited with the adaptation when the talent is up to the task or the vision of the filmmakers adds something special to the original.
HUGE THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO CAME DOWN TO HELP!
For any information about the results of the focus group feel free to contact me!
HUGE THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO CAME DOWN TO HELP!
For any information about the results of the focus group feel free to contact me!