Evaluation Question 3

3. What have you learnt through your audience feedback?

To allow ourselves the best possible opportunity to meet our target audience's preferences, we organised a series of methods to allow ourselves an opportunity to acquire this information and research and therefore adapt our trailer to produce the desired results.

The first method we used to acquire feedback was creating a vlog questionnaire, completed by our target audience. We did this by asking available students who fell into the age range of our target audience, to take part in a questionnaire including 5 vital questions which we would then film the responses to and edit them together using 'iMovie' to create a vlog. We decided to collect our research in this way as it is a more unique and fun way of displaying our research rather than a written questionnaire, and it allowed us to adapt our questions and ask additional ones, depending on the answers they gave us.
 This proved to be a beneficial form of gaining results as it gave us an idea of what our target audience enjoys most in a horror movie and the typical conventions that they would expect to see when watching it.

In our vlog questionnaire, one of our questions was 'In a horror movie trailer, do you prefer it if the story is shown so that you know what it is about, or do you prefer knowing minimal details until you watch the film?' The results from this question were very useful when creating our trailer because we were then able to plan our storyboard so that it has the correct shots and dialogue so that our storyline is more mysterious and not much information is given away, so that this would encourage the audience to be more interested in watching the movie to find out the whole story.
Additionally, another question that proved to be beneficial within our research was 'Do you find paranormal or slasher movies more scary?' From the feedback we received, we found that girls tend to find paranormal movies more scary, whereas boys prefer to watch slasher movies, although they may not necessarily find them more scary. This helped us to form the storyline of our film and base it around the character of the creepy man's deceased wife, as our client in mind is a teenage girl so therefore, we believed this would have the most effective outcome.






Furthermore, by frequently posting updates of the trailer's progress to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, this has allowed us to receive feedback and response from our audience.
 It has allowed a direct path of communication to our audience to not only keep them updated with the progression of the trailer, poster and website, but to allow us to ask questions and gain responses and inspiration whenever needed. For example, we asked our audience what they thought of the trailer after the first cut was complete, we then took on board the responses we received and were able to adapt and improve our trailer to fit their ideas.





In addition, a film screening was organised for our target audience so that they could feed back on what they enjoyed most about the trailer and what we could improve on. From this we learnt that the majority of people believed that the horror genre was clear and that the music and sound effects effectively created suspense and fit the genre.
 However one person informed us that the background noise in the car scene was too loud and this caused them to struggle in understanding what the characters were saying. From this we were able to edit the sound to try and make the dialogue louder and clearer. One of our questions was 'Did the voice-over help you to understand the storyline?'This question produced mixed results. We realised that there was confusion concerning the character of the creepy man's wife, therefore having a voice-over of a woman reciting wedding vows proved to be misleading. To solve this we added an additional voice-over of the man repeating his vows too, to reinforce the fact that he was married to her.

We also asked our audience to list some shots that they liked the most, and that they found to be the most memorable. These results included; the blood on the wall, the bath shot, and the man playing the piano. We were really pleased with this feedback as these shots were aimed to shock and intrigue the audience and therefore they evidently accomplished the desired effect.

In conclusion, the use of feedback from our audience has proved to be extremely beneficial throughout the trailer process as it has allowed us to gain new ideas and discover the elements of what would shock, intrigue, scare and interest our client in the most effective way. The acquisition of this research has been extremely aided by the use of social networking sites as it has allowed us to reach out to our audience, at any time, to ask questions or to share the development process.