Throughout our project, audience feedback was an important
factor in the decision making process and the actual creation of our final
trailer and the independent ancillary tasks. Our focus group for the film were
teenagers aged fifteen and over so we tried to use a sample for our research
that related to that so we used a variety of people from our sixth form and
people on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to gain a deeper understanding
into what people would like and dislike about our products.
I started off with the design of my products by making hand
drawn designs for the magazine front cover and the poster. However, because the
drawings were so rough and I only did one of each, audience feedback was not
that necessary. I did however get together a group of people to give feedback on
the three different computer generated templates for both the magazine and the
poster. The feedback I received was really helpful, even if it was negative as
it made me see which ideas the target demographic likes and which were not so
popular. It was particularly helpful when the audience gave their opinions as I
could then interpret that into the products I would be creating. As well as
that, encouraging comments about certain templates meant that I could take
those templates which were favoured and work on them to create good designs.
At the same time of doing this audience research, I sent out
a questionnaire made on the website Questionpro, on the social websites Facebook and Twitter asking people what they likes
and disliked in horror film. This piece of research was important for the making
of the trailer as it gave the whole group an insight into what we should
include in our trailer to make it exciting and thrilling to watch. We asked
questions lie ‘Which weapon do you find most threatening?’ or ‘Which of the
locations in horror films do you find most scary?’ From the feedback we learned
what our target demographic liked in horror films and we could add aspects of
that to our own trailer to make it appealable to the audience like basing the
film in the woods as that was the location that was found to be most scary or
making our monster in the film more supernatural as the people participating in
our research enjoying watching films such as ‘Paranormal Activity’. Because of
the feedback from the questionnaire we received we could apply the audience
suggestions to our trailer to make sure that it has aspects of the horror genre
that our demographic likes therefore would go and watch it. This particular
research also helped with the decision about the age rating of our film as the
majority of the participants were aged between fifteen and seventeen so it not
only helped us decide on the content of our film but the audience of our film
too.
When we finished
the shooting and editing of the trailer it was only appropriate to get together
a group of people again to collect feedback on the finished product to see what
they enjoyed about it and if there was any room for improvement. We asked the
sample five questions which we kept open so that they could write down their
opinions about what they thought of the trailer. The questions were as follows:
1. What do you think the story line was?
2. What do you find the scariest about this
trailer?
3. What do you think of the soundtrack? Please
explain you answer.
4. Dose this trailer explain the horror genre, if so
in what ways?
5. What could be improved in our trailer?
Once the viewing of the trailer was finished we collected
the questionnaire and put the results together. Question 1 was asked mainly to
see whether the narrative of our film was portrayed effectively in the trailer and
most of the feedback was pretty much positive. People responded with things
like “Little girl called Eve kills people who enter the woods/park she went
missing in” or “A girl called Eve goes missing in a park 6 years ago and now is
back killing people” which is pretty much it when it comes to our synopsis so
we must have put that across effectively. Only one person out of the ten did
not understand what the narrative is about.
The second question about what the audience found the
scariest about the trailer was to see whether our trailer conveyed a sense of
genre and a lot of people’s responses were that it was the little girl Eve
which is very good as she is the monster in the film so therefore has to be
scary. Some feedback included people saying “The little girl creates a sense of
familiarity and you can relate to her. She also looks really scary”, “The
beginning shows the little girl looked scary and too innocent but then she
disappears and you see her stalking people” and “The little girl” so it was
good to get feedback that positively reflected the storyline.
The sound in a trailer plays a big role so it was helpful to
learn that people liked it with comments like “Fits well with the emotion of
trailer, adds to the tension and mystery. Strengthens the conveying of horror
genre” or “The little girl singing was really scary”. We wanted to convey the
horror not just in the scenes and editing but also in the soundtrack so getting
feedback saying “The soundtrack was the best thing” made us realise that we did
just that.
Question number four was Does this trailer explain the
horror genre, if so in what ways? A lot of people agreed that it did with
things like “Yes as there is a sustained eerie atmosphere which indicates that
the group were in danger of being killed, with no way of getting away” or “Yes,
has similarities to horror trailers today. It has some elements such as scary
music, killings etc.” I was happy to learn that we successfully conveyed the
horror genre and that people got that through the trailer.
In question five we asked the sample if there were any
improvements that could have been made to out trailer. It was only fair that a
lot of people has suggestions on what could have been done better and because
our trailer was very low budget it was inevitable that it would need some tweaking.
A lot of the sample opted for more gory details like “More blood, gore,
weapons, use of sinister soundtrack” or a better use of equipment “The camera
quality”.
Overall, the audience feedback attained throughout the
production of all our products was really helpful as it provided more ideas and
inspiration for the creation of the final pieces.
We also individualy posted the questionaire along with the trailer on Facebook to get some further audience feedback about our final product. Overal, the trailer received very positive feedback just like it did in our ather sample group. Some comments included "Awesome trailer. Better than some that our currently out there" and "Really good! I actually enjoyed watching that" which is very encouraging and flattering to learn that people enjoyed our final product.
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