Evaluation Question 3 What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Audience feedback When making a movie it is essential that there is a reflection of audience expectations, when making a film of a certain genre the audience will be expecting certain conventions; for example in a horror trailer you would be expecting a jump scare after the end of the trailer; if isn’t there you will notice its lacking. In women in black they did a lot of research into audience expectations; they released trailers and posters and spread it all over the internet. They then got people to send in responses or to be interactive with the product, for example they set up an online competition on YouTube. There was a theatre show being released at the same time as the movie this meant that the movie had to also reflect the audiences expectations of the show.
How did we gather feedback? We gathered feedback by talking to people about the film after showing them the trailer. We also had a screening for the class so they could give us feedback, and seeing as they are the 15+ target audience we had a good average result. Alongside this we also showed them our posters and magazines so they could give us peer feedback. We recorded it so that we could reference it later, its attached to the post.
Feedback analysis and improvement • Above this Issuu there is a YouTube video of peoples responses; Good Points • A variety of shots, there wasn’t a excess use of close up or long shot. • The make up was effective and had the desired affect on the audience • Sound was effective at points a slightly more positive reaction than negative 60/40 split • Story came across well and was explained effectively in the trailer Bad Points • The jump scare did not have the desired effect we changed this by adding a new scream at the end • Speed up the shots in the middle, the pace falls short • Some people thought that there was too many nature shots through the section but with the middle section changed I doubt this would be an issue any more • Abrupt ending, we changed this by adding a few extra shots in the end to leave the audience feeling slightly sour
Questionnaire • When doing my questionnaire to find out what people found most entertaining when it came to horror there were several strong responses. To find the appropriate page for this look In label D with the post Horror Film Questionaire + Analysis • The age range of our product would appeal to the teenage and millennial audiences; what we have learnt from this is that Horror is very mainstream and thus reflects the times it is in; it was extremely important to capitalise on the most popular genre of Horror this age range was interested in, Zombie Horrors. This caused us to look in to other existing media involving the genre, we then found the common conventions of this genre and reflected them in our own movie. For instance we found that the walking dead was the most popular Zombie genre, so we tried to make our zombies makeup and our “universe” appear similar while still being individual. • We found that people only watched horror movies “sometimes” meaning that people don’t find them as engaging as other genres, movies such as romance or fantasy movies are designed to keep you engaged even after the movie has ended; where as after some research we thought that films such as Horror and Action are there for short engagement but to a more extreme level. Thus when designing our trailer we tried to make it engaging for our audiences throughout the trailer rather than leave them with a strong message. • Psychological horrors proved to be more popular with out target audiences this is probably because they are slightly different to the average horror, Zombie genre is very similar to psychological horrors because they focus more heavily on surprising and disgusting audiences rather than shocking them; I find that this is a much more effective horror genre and that when making my film I wanted to reflect that discusting horror; through the blood guts and gore (Make up)