Test screening questionnaires
We have the first cut on a historical drama we eventually want to try to get on History Channel or Lifetime. It’s about a group of young Quaker Girls who create an anti-Rebel/Pro-Abolutionist Newspaper in the middle of Confederate Virginia.
We want to have a test screening to determine plot comprehension, pace, etc. Where do we find an example of a test screening card or form we can “borrow?”
– Drew
Virginia
There are several companies that do paid test screenings, and I’m sure each has a template and a standardized methodology. But you’re not interested in statistics, and don’t need to compare your movie with other historical dramas of the last five years. You just want to make your movie better. So you can safely make up a sheet of your own.
Here’s what you want to include:
First question: How did they like it? You want to get a sense of (a) what changes the people who liked it feel are necessary, and (b) whether there are any changes that could win over the people who didn’t really like it.1
A space to list the things they liked most.
A space to list the things they liked least.
A space to list any moments they felt it lagged.
Ask if they ever got confused — and when, and why.
If you have specific areas of concern (music, narration, whatever), you can either make those open answer questions, or give some sort of 1-5 grid for circling.
A big thank you at the end, because they are doing you a huge favor watching your in-progress project.
You want your viewer to be able to fill this all out in less than five minutes, so that means no more than two pages. Your best bet is to photocopy it on card stock, two sides.
In the Downloads section, I’ve included the form we used for our second test screening of The Nines. Feel free to use it as a template. 2
Because you’ll ask: Yes, it was strange test screening a movie in which a significant plot point concerns the test screening process. But it was a big help.
Ultimately, you may still want or need to do a more professional test screening. For instance, if you sold it to Lifetime, they might need to know how their audience responds to it, so they can tailor their advertising appropriately. But for the early stages you’re in, I’d save your money and do it yourself.
- Often, the folks who don’t like it will never like it, but it’s worth hearing their opinion so you’ll know what to expect. ↩
- The second question, “Given a pair of magical scissors, is there anything you’d snip out?” is the one I always wished people would ask me. ↩
Filed under: Film Industry, Projects, QandA, Resources, Television, The Movie
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February 28th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I liked that you had to specify “confused-in-a-bad-way” on the Nines questionnaire.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
It’s probably just a one time typo, but I think it’s actually “abolitionist” not “abolutionist.”
Would it be beneficial to include questions like rating their familiarity and interest in Civil War/Quaker/Confederate history before and after the movie? If someone is a Civil War buff they might be unfairly biased one way or another that might lead you in the wrong direction. Just a thought.
February 29th, 2008 at 12:35 am
What do you think, how many people are needed for a representative test screening? And where do you find them / where do you advertise? Putting an advert in a Civil War fanzine might attract a too special kind of audience.
February 29th, 2008 at 4:57 am
People can only express their opinion about the things that they remember. There is a lot of stuff in a movie. Would it be beneficial to provide some sort of a memory aid to the test screeners? A sheet containing a miniature screen capture image from each of the scenes, perhaps?
March 1st, 2008 at 1:50 am
Nice. BTW, it’s usually good to include and even number scale on those on a scale of.. questions. Otherwise people can just plump for the middle number - even numbers mean they have to choose a real opinion.
March 1st, 2008 at 7:47 am
You should add this question to the form: Would you recommend this movie to other people? This question will tell you if people really liked the movie. A story:
Went to a test screening once, filled out a card, and was asked to stay afterwards for a “focus group� session of about 24 people. The moderator asked “Who rated this movie good or better?� (Scale was: Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent). Everyone in the focus group, except me, raised their hands. I was the only person in the focus group that rated in the movie Poor or Fair (I rated it Fair).
Throughout the session, it appeared that I was the only person who didn’t like the movie. Everyone else seemed to think it was hilarious.
Later, the moderator asked “Who would recommend this movie to others?� I did not raise my hand, but neither did half the focus group. No more than 10 of the 24 people raised their hands. This is very telling.
Everyone in the focus group (except me) indicated that they thought the movie was at least “Good.� However, less than half of the people in the group said they would recommend it to others.
My question: Who are these people that say the movie is good but wouldn’t recommend it to others? Who wouldn’t recommend a good movie? Has anyone ever uttered this phrase: “I thought it was good, but I wouldn’t recommend it?� To me, if you wouldn’t recommend a movie to others, you probably didn’t like it too much.
I think this shows that people really didn’t like the movie as much as they said. They checked the word Good because it was in the middle of the scale, but more likely thought the movie was only Fair. Otherwise, how do you explain all these people who supposedly thought it was good, but wouldn’t recommend it?
March 1st, 2008 at 5:05 pm
John - would it be too much of a burden to tell us how The Nine’s test screening went? I remember the question of whether or not you’d have a screening for anyone other than friends, then a later mention that you’d done it, but no breakdown. I’m curious how you pulled it off, and what made you decide to do it in the face of your concerns.
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:02 am
When we did our two test screenings for ‘Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood,’ the numbers came back identical, despite the radical changes in editing. Go figure. It was actually a very good comedy/drama until Warners kept hounding us to cut it tighter, then all comedic/dramatic timing was lost. Cutting a film tighter doesn’t make it better, it makes it impossible to get involved in the characters’ plights. Idiot executives again. But the audience screenings did help us to shoot and cut in a few establishing shots here and there just to clear some things up.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I find it interesting that so many of these screenings are done in LA. And of course, while the ask the audience if they are involved in entertainment, who doesn’t lie and say “no.” Why not do screenings in Chicago? Dallas? Nashville? Somewhere that’s still a city, but not an industry mecca. A friend who works for one of the screening companies once told me that they used to look everyone up on IMDB and then eliminate them from the list if they had an entry, but then ended up deleting most of their lists so they stopped. I saw a test screening of Win A Date With Tad Hamilton and used my “comments” section to point out three major continuity errors…I wonder if they listened.
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:15 pm
@David Greenman:
They do screenings outside of Los Angeles. The one for Charlie was in Chicago. But since executives want to come to the screenings, it’s a lot easier to do them in town (or in Orange County).
@Erik Harrison:
The test screenings for The Nines were more on the order of “friends and family” screenings, in that we only recruited people we knew, each with a guest they could vouch for. Because we were taking the movie to Sundance with the hopes of selling it, it was especially important that no pre-reviews leaked out on places like AICN.
The comment cards (and conversations in the lobby) were a big help in figuring out where people were getting confused in the wrong way, and where we could tighten pacing. We did one screening before the reshoots, and one after. The second one was much better for the progress.
After the movie sold, Newmarket did a few similar screenings, but nothing involving cards or potential changes.
@Jeff:
What you’re referring to is “Definite Recommends,” which is a key statistic on professional test audience screenings. It’s a metric that really means something — but only if you have an audience that’s not made up of friends and family.
@Jeremy:
Another way to think of it: if people have a hard time reconstructing the movie in their heads, it may not be working right. Best to focus on the things that really stick out, positively or negatively.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Thanks for the reply, John.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:04 am
John, we too, did mostly “friends and family” screenings on YA YA’s in our editing suite. We seemed to do countless F&F screenings and they were really helpful, maybe more so than the two audience screenings, though of course with an audience screening you are going to see what impacts a full audience and what falls flat.
That, too, depends on the audience: when I first moved to Southern California to get into the film industry, I was working at the Cineplex Beverly Center as an usher. I remember when “Harry and the Hendersons” opened in the two big theatres upstairs. The same film print was literally strung from one projector to the other so the second theatre got the same scenes a few moments later. I would walk from one theatre to the next and in each one, both with fully packed audiences, the reactions were utterly different. People in Theatre One cheered and laughed and applauded, people in Theatre Two guffawed and slept and snored. Then I noticed that Theatre One had more children in it than Two, which was mostly made up of adults in their thirties or forties wondering what the hell they were doing there.
So the type of audience matters. At a preview of the Demi Moore “Scarlet Letter” in Brentwood, the film was literally laughed off the screen. It was awful, mostly because I couldn’t hear John Barry’s lush score, but because, having run previews myself as an assistant editor, I really felt for the film crew who were at the back of the theatre. The laughing began during Demi’s and Gary Oldman’s love scene in the grain and escalated to the point where it felt like the building was going to collapse. I sat there wondering why on earth they invited so many males between the ages of 20 and 35. It was just awful.
Anyway, I got in to that preview because I lied. Yes, I told them I had nothing to do with the film industry. Maybe I cursed the screening…
March 18th, 2008 at 5:22 am
John, I translated the questionnaire into Russian and would like to publish it on my blog. How should I attribute this work to you? As per Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported from the Creative Commons website I must seek your guidance on this. Thank you.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Three caveats on the questionnaire:
First, don’t be surprised when the scenes that appear on the “scenes I liked most” list, also show up on the “scenes I liked least” list. It happens every time and, in a funny sort of way, means that you’re pushing some buttons. Not a bad thing.
Second, be very very careful how you ask the question about things that concern you (this is especially true in the those awful focus groups after the screenings). As soon as you ask whether the audience had a problem with something, you’ve called it out to them and they start responding to perceived problems, even if they didn’t feel them. If you have an issue with the music in your film, don’t ask about the music, ask if there were things that contributed to the audience’s enjoyment or lack of enjoyment of the film.
You get the idea. As soon as you give them a pencil, they all think they’re Roger Ebert.
And, finally, be very very careful about what changes you make as a result of the questionnaires. Too many people use it to justify something they’ve wanted to do all along, and others use it as a cudgel to beat someone over the head. Each audience is different and each person in each audience is different. Take everything as information, not as marching orders.