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3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is vital in media, the audience are the individuals who you are basing your film for; they bring in revenue and they also are what makes the film popular or not, or even just enjoy the film to market; eg word of mouth in this scenario. The main aim of a product is to appeal and please an audience, this is a directors and other individual’s main aim in Xmas Eve. Our particular trailer is more about broadcasting our film to horror loves and sealing their approval. Our product is going to receive audience feedback by asking our friends and peers for their constructive criticism and positives of our trailer with the use of questionnaires and test screenings. I believe this is very effective method of receiving audience feedback, as the audience in which we are targeting act are the teenage life sector; therefore by asking our friends and peers they all will be in this age sector. Throughout the making of the product our teacher was our mature voice of opinion therefore we were lacking ideas and methods to improve our product. By voicing there opinions it allowed us to make changes and be more suited to our targeted audience and essentially meet our aim of ‘pleasing our audience’. In addition when working independently I didn’t have the support of my group therefore this made it more difficult to bring together a different product personally. This lead me to gave information off individuals regarding my film poster and magazine to help develop and create a successful media platform to market from. This also enabled me to get ideas of suitable demographics for our media platforms from different interests of opinions. In addition each individual in my class did the same process of receiving feedback from their trailer, movie poster and magazine this enabled myself to act as a proconsumer. In addition Avatar as previously mentioned, did a different range of marketing, such as the podcast for Facebook where the audience picked out the questions. Avatar is a good example of extensive marketing to ensure they are meeting demographics of their audience.

I have attached the range of feedback received in this post, which varied with a range of opinions mostly classifying the need for ‘background music’ and ‘sound effects’ however our peers commented on the range of shot types and which shots particularly were most effective. I think that our trailer struggled most with ‘time management’ therefore I believe that our draft was behind schedule when our test screening was.

Our trailer/film challenged forms and conventions as horror films tend to be set at ‘Halloween’ if they are going to be set in any sort of festive season. However be believe that the unique selling point for us was our horror being incorporated with ‘christmas’. I was brought to our attention that our target audience liked that it had that link between horror and the season of joy. Throughout the trailer we wanted to make it as conventional as possible therefore we used ‘actors and actresses’ which were teenagers to entice our teenage audience as our audience can relate to them. Which was recognised during our feedback from our peers.

It is particularly a form and convention of a horror film to have an increasing pace, which was mentioned by our peers they liked that the storyline was so clear with the increasing speed of the trailer. Again a horror trailer isn’t supposed to ‘reveal’ too much of the plot only an outline. Although our audience liked this, this worried my group and myself as our audience may see it as predictable when visiting our film when it is released.

Another point brought to my attention was our shot types, we included a range of medium close ups, extreme close ups, point of view, over the shoulder, POV, establishing

and track/dolly shot. This was a good point made by our peers as my group and myself believe we met this personal target of ours.

In addition our use of intertitles were mentioned, our group tried to have enough titles to make it conventional but also wanted to ensure that the titles weren’t telling ‘the storyline’ and our shots were doing that for us, throughout the feedback we received we consider this to be achieved as it wasn’t brought forward as any constructive criticism.

Since receiving our feedback from Xmas Eve Draft. We have made a numerous amount of changes, as I believe that our audience demographics are always considered when consuming our product.

Vast number of individuals mentioned the use of sound and sound effects may enable the story to be ‘told’ and the plot could be built up into more depth. We listened to our peers and incorporated dark, horror music and Christmas themed music. This related to our slasher genre film with the use of dark and grunge music. The use of Christmas music helped us build up our plot and created continuity within our narrative theme. In addition dialogue is important as horror films contain more ‘background music’ than ‘dialogue’, by adding dialogue still helped us create more of an impact on certain events in our film; for example; when our protagonist is planning revenge ‘ he mentions shell be sorry’ this also helped to achieve the feedback from one of peers as he considered our plot to be in no ‘sequence’ due to no dialogue. We turned this into a positive by listening to the feedback and making changes.

Another change of our Xmas Eve trailer was a shot to clearly signify whom the psychopath killer was, this was brought to our attention that possibly more shots were necessary to give more of the plot away or even just to signify the killer. We included a shot of our protagonist anger developing; he is shown getting out a Santa costume in order to start the revenge.

I also received feedback from my peers about my film poster and magazine cover. As previously mentioned I struggled with ‘time management’ my audience found it hard to suggest feedback for my magazine cover as it was very bland at this point therefore I decided to focus mainly on my film poster.

My audience said that my film poster had an overall idea and fit forms of conventions, as hoped a comparison to Final Destination was mentioned. When researching into ancillary texts, my inspirations for my product were Final Destination, Prom night and Scream therefore the fact that it came to my attention that my targeted audience liked that, was very good positive feedback for me. In addition my audience feedback also stated how the choice of colours didn’t work therefore it challenged forms and conventions ‘too much’ to make it an unsuccessful product. Below shows my development since receiving my feedback.