3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When creating and making my products and this blog, the audience feedback was an important factor is it enabled me to learn what the audience for my trailer, poster and magazine like and what I can change and improve within the task. From finding out from different forms of research such as question pro, social media websites and focus group I could find out about the target demographic, and learn from feedback of information fitting their needs and wants. The products need to fit to my audiences and future audience’s preferences of horror products and conventions, with learning from their feedback I was able to find out what to progress, enhance and develop with my final task.

I first needed to find quantitative data from audience feedback online, this data was to help me understand their preferences of slasher films and what we should add into our creation of the trailer. I used this site www.questionpro.co.uk to conduct primary research of my own, it allowed me to create a survey including several questions like,

what's your favourite animal? , Do you like horror movies? , How do you watch movies? , What elements within a horror movie tend to scare you the most? , What location tends to create a frightening atmosphere? , What colours do you think would be representative within a horror genre? , What's your favourite horror film? , What weapon do you think is the most appropriate for a horror movie? , What weapon do you think is the most appropriate for a horror movie? From creating the survey I had to distribute it on social media websites to get the feedback, to learning from the feedback we had to convert the information into statistics and data we understood, from asking the questions it helped us find out what to add to the trailer, like having a conventional knife as the weapon and to follow the way the Friday the 13^th was created and produced as it was the most favoured film. From putting this information into a PowerPoint, it made me able to go through each question and slide and learn about their feedback, which effected the making of my film one the factors I learnt was that a popular scary film some liked was the ring, we used intertextuality of this with our killer ruby. With the weapon question and the location this helped me and group understand the best Props and locations which we should use, so the trailer is effective and conveys a horror narrative. From all the question especially the favourite animal we learnt about the audience as well as learning about what to include to the trailer, with the animal question this was a question to find out whether we had masculine aggressive audience or a feminine audience, we learnt they’re a masculine personality audience as they liked dogs, lions and tigers.

Next I had to get feedback from focus groups to find qualitative data from the audience, I had to focus groups, and the first was on the magazine and poster rough designs and templates. With this focus group I aimed to learn about the designs I have created can

change and how they can develop or improve. On the templates I had most conventional products of both posters and layouts, I wanted to see if they would like a different colour scheme, or if the layout of the poster or magazine should change. I found they enjoyed and responded to liking the colour scheme of red black and white as the colours worked well in conveying the genre to the audience from just the appearance of the magazine or poster, but also they liked the conventional layouts of having the title at the top and the main central images, with the Fangoria layouts the suggest I should keep the reel to the left and have their colour scheme but embed my own for my feature story. We showed them the ideas of our typography's including the one we wanted to pick, 80% of the group suggested the same typography as we chose as they thought it worked as a good design that looks like flesh being ripped, however the 20% suggested that it was too much on the pages, we decided to go with the bigger group because us and the bigger group liked the same typography, they suggested in the group that the typography worked well with our two designs of the magazine and poster and it looks more professional element as we are a low budget company. ‘The typography which is red and white mixed, on the black background looks more effective’, and ‘The idea of flesh being torn is resembled in the red and white one’.

<Choice of typography's

The next piece of feedback was the focus groups after the trailer and sound where complete, we had to gather the audience and make them watch our trailer, and following answering questions about what they liked in the trailer and what could have been better.

The group and I made 5 questions for the audience to answer of their opinions of our trailer, we wanted qualitative data so this made us ask open questions which would give detail about the questions, we needed truthful answers so the group and I could understand where we have gone wrong, and if carrying the task out again what could have improved. We got the focus group to first watch the trailer, we explained why we are doing this task and then told them the five questions, and this helped us to learn about the actual trailer and people’s opinions. Below you will see the questions we asked and a few examples of the answers we received.

                                              

The questions we asked were:

1) What elements of this trailer bear resemblance or how does it differ from other trailers you've seen? (Preferably within the Horror genre)

2) Using the trailer you've viewed, what exactly is the premise of The Return?

3) What segments or parts of ‘The Return’ trailer did you find most scary?

4) What were the worst and best elements of the trailer?

5) How could we improve these negative elements?

With the first question, what elements of this trailer bear resemblance or how does it differ from other trailers you've seen? (Preferably within the Horror genre), with this

question we wanted to find out if they understood the resemblance we conveys in the trailer and if it was similar to other slasher trailers for example Friday the 13^th and Halloween or it had differences. With the resemblance, we found most of the audience

thought it had similarities of ‘The Ring’ character, this was the image we was conveying through the trailer as intertextuality, We found also the sound and the intense shots bare resemblance as other trailers they have watched have similar forms and conventions within them, with the responses to the differs most suggest the trailer was conventional to other trailers they have seen for example group of teenagers, however the said it differed because we had female killer. This showed to me that I have learnt the way we conveyed the narrative, was effective. One of the audience’s feedback ‘Mirrors the Grudge/Ring through the use of a young female “Monster”. But “Unconventional to the fact they used a female character as the killer”.

The second question Using the trailer you've viewed, what exactly is the premise of The Return?, this was a question asking if they knew and could follow the trailer according to

the story, it told us from the responses they knew the young girl had gone missing and she has come back to haunt the main character and her group of friends, however some of the audience where unsure to why the killer has come back for the revenge, this is explained in the synopsis but was not included within our trailer because with trailers we do not want to give away the whole narrative to the audience, we want to grow enigma. However I have learnt we should have included a scene about how the final girl and she has a relation so the audience was not too unsure.  The question was to suggest whether the narrative within the story was successfully shown, learning from the feedback I suggest we could have made it clearer of the relationship but about the girl who went missing and the revenge most of the audience understood.  Another audience’s response “A young girl has returned, and gets revenge on a group of teenagers”.

The third question what segments or parts of ‘The Return’ trailer did you find most scary?, with this question we wanted to understand, as it is a slasher film its role is to convey

scary scenes, so we needed to know if the audience where scared and it was effective in this section. With the trailer and the responses to this question we found that the sound track and the shots of our killer where the main scary segments of the trailer, this was because the way the sound made them jump and made the scenes intense, to the final girl and her appearing out of nowhere. There was other elements which people found scary such as the snapping of the neck, death scenes and the blood on the killer’s hands. The audience suggested these factors made the trailer scary, I have learnt without including the sound in the trailer to the effective standard it is, it has made a massive improvement and it not only conveys the genre but it makes people scared of what is on the screen. This question has showed positive feedback from the audience because they have found element which we intended to be scary for them, to be horrific. Response to question three, “The scary music and every appearance of the scary girl, including the death scene”.

The next question number four is what were the worst and best elements of the trailer?

This question allowed us from the feedback to see what went very well, to what bits we should have worked more on. We found that the worst features was that the quality of some of the shots, meaning somewhere blurry and some not focused and that the acting of the characters was not brilliant, I learnt with this feedback from being a low independent budget group we could not have amazing characters which cost us a lot of money. The best features where the voice overs of the screams as they very effective, the tension building through the scary shots and the use of our killer, Ruby. From the worst features I have learnt that if I was re-filming this trailer I would have a steady camera shots, and the way we filmed theses shot we would make them convey more meaning. Best - “there is a good build-up of tension, Dylan scream and the scream at the end” Worst – “it was shot in the light in the forest and in some scenes so ruined the mystery of the killer".

The last question five how could we improve these negative elements? With the negative elements this was to learn from the feedback what we could improve, develop or change if we had the chance. Firstly some of shots, did not fully convey the narrative we tried to show to the audience, not all the shots made sense to the audience as they did not know the narrative for example the party scene. Also showing the killer too early within the trailer, the killer was shown at the start as and then evil but this was too early as a convention of the trailer was to keep the identity. The improvements of our actors, I learnt that the actors was not the best quality, and some actors was not the best effort. This was a main element of improvement because it changed the quality of the trailer, if the actors gave more effort or we had good paid actors the trailer could have been higher quality. “Use shots to question the killer identity rather than showing her at the beginning”, and “The pictures at the party could have had more relevance to the plot”.

 While the audience where watching the trailer we recorded them.

 When the trailer was finished we needed to gain feedback to learn what we could have changed and what we have learnt about, from doing the focus group it was a smaller group then posting it online allowed a mass audience to respond of like the trailer. I choose to post it on face and gain responses from the audience ‘Friends’ of mine. They all were shown the link to YouTube and allowed to comment their responses. All of the responses where positive, so they did not suggest how it could be changed or improved. Below I was show you a print screen from FaceBook and some of the comments.