Q3) What have you learned from your audience feedback

When first creating my magazine front cover and poster templates i decided to show a focus group, consisting of teenage horror fans, the different styles as well as asking them to pick one they preferred. I also conducted individual interviews in which i used a 'semi-structured' style in order to gain quantitative and qualitative responses. Some examples of responses were:

'I think the red and black are good colours to use for a horror poster as you can tell its horror straight away'- This showed me that the audience were familiar with the conventions of horror films and they understand the connotations of these colours for example red has connotations of blood and gore and black has connotations of death.

'It might be better to use a closer shot of the killer so the page looks more full'. The shot I did use was a medium shot and although it was advised to go for a close up i purposely went against this as i wanted the red coat to be clearly visible in the poster and magazine front cover as it is iconic throughout our film.


Deciding I needed more insight into my target demographic I created a questionpro.com survey. The website enabled me to ask both quantitative and qualitative questions. I found from this that my survey was taken by mostly males which seems to point at the idea that the horror genre in genre as well as the slasher genre in particular seems to have a larger male audience. I also found that the majority of respondants were 15-20 year olds, however it might be worth taking into account that this may just be the nature of respondance rates and perhaps it is just a coincidence that 15-20 year olds are more likely to respond to a survey than the other age groups. This also had implications for the age certificate i gave my film, I proposed a 15 certificate would be appropriate due to the information I found out from my survey. This meant the content I included in my trailer had to be appropriate for this age range.

I also created a link to my trailer on Facebook, allowing people to comment on it about what they thought of the trailer. This also built up a hype for my movie and created an exchange between the audience and my production. The majority of comments were about the tension and how it was built during my trailer effectively. However people mentioned that the first caption slowed the flow of the movie down and creates imbalance within the trailer however it is then regained due to the soundtrack.

At the premier of our trailer we invited around twelve students to watch the trailer and fill out feedback questionnaires. They watched the trailer once and then filled out a questionnaire with set questions which were:
1. What do you think the storyline is?
2. What do you find scariest about this trailer?
3. What do you think about the soundtrack, explain?
4. Does this trailer fit the horror genre, explain?
5. What could be improved in our trailer?



 Here is an example of one response sheet which has been filled in by a student at our premier.

This participant overall enjoyed our trailer and thought it was effective. For the first question we asked what do you think the storyline is? This is an important question as it enables us to see if our narrative has come across to the audience effectively. The fact that this participant has almost perfectly explained the basic storyline shows us that we have achieved this.

 

They also thought the soundtrack was effective in creating suspense and building tension. This assures us that there will be an audience for our film after we have released the trailer. We know that the genre is easily identifiable. This is important as people may chose to watch a film solely based on the genre of it.

Although this respondant did not feel there was room for improvement other participants criticised the storyline, saying it left the audience wondering why the group of friends had gone into the woods. Implications for this may be that next time we would could have a stronger sense of the narrative within the trailer but remembering not to give away too much as we need to keep the audience guessing so that they will come to watch the film.