What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the process of making our trailer, poster and website, we made sure to use methods of obtaining feedback from an audience to help receive opinions on how we could improve our work to make it more appealing and effective. Overall we found that we received positive feedback and that an audience would be interested in our product.


Trailer feedback

After creating the first draft of our trailer, we showed this to our media teachers in order to receive professional criticisms for what we should change and improve. From this feedback we were made aware that there was a location anomaly as our voice over talked about Whitechapel whereas our filming shots showed Camden and therefore it was confusing for the viewer. To adjust this we were then able to change the script of the voice over to clear up this anomaly by explaining that whilst the original Jack the Ripper's hunting ground was Whitechapel, our serial killer decided to move to Camden. In addition, we were told that we needed to change the order of our shots and break up scenes, intertwining scenes to make sure that the shots did not give away too much of the plot. We therefore spread out the scenes of our female victim running over

the course of the trailer as well as the killer walking and the package being sent. In addition, the feedback given suggested that the anchorage of the montage of images at the beginning of our trailer need to be changed with the duration changed so that they started off slower near the beginning, gradually getting faster as the soundtrack picked up the pace. We feel that we managed to make these initial improvements given effectively and continued to make our product better. 

Having made these changes and finishing the second draft, we showed this version in a film screening being held which gave us a chance to show our work to people in our target audience and use a hand out questionnaire to understand what was effective and what needed further changing.This is an image of the hand out questionnaire we gave out, using the image of our poster as the background:

The questions given included:

1. What genre do you think the trailer is? giving a multiple choice answers to chose from 
2. Which part stood out the most?
3. Did you think that the sound used was effective? allowing an comments on the sound used line for extra comments
4. Is there anything you did not understand? with a comment line available if yes is selected.
5. Did you think that using black and white was effective?
6. Any other comments?

What we gained from the audience's feedback of these questions

From these results we found that all of the audience were able to identify our trailer as Horror genre. This was very pleasing as it meant that the semiotics used in our trailer successfully displayed our chosen genre and that emotions of fear and tension may of been created. Popular Answers from the second questions taught us which parts stood out the most for the viewers which

were the close up shot of the eye used, the blood and knives and the stopwatch shot.This again proved that we had managed to make a variety of memorable shots and that each of these shots represented something that made our work more engaging.It was positive to see that the large majority of the audience believed that the sound used was effective giving positive comments such as "good beat","liked the voiceover" and "made it modern day" with only one negative feedback comment saying that it was "too slow paced". However after thinking about this negative comment we still decided to keep the sound the same as the greater part of viewers thought it was appropriate. All of the audience also said that there were no parts that they didn't understand which implies that we were able to show enough of the plot for it to be understandable whilst not giving too much away. This is important as we are trying to advertise a film so we needed the audience to understand enough of the storyline to want to go and see the film. As well as this they also said that they found that the black and white effect we had used was effective.This was reassuring as previously we had been worried that the black and white would not show the modern day aspect of our film, yet the feedback shows that it worked in our best interest. One comment for improvement was given saying "maybe try bits in colour", but after changing some parts into colour we felt that it took away from the use of blood and shadow and made some parts seem confusing. 

Poster feedback

When creating our poster we used the program 'Survey monkey' to create a questionnaire and ask questions about which image we should use for our poster. The questions and results can be found on our previous blog (click here to view). 

We found that the feedback we got from this survey was extremely helpful as it helped us narrow down which initial idea to choose and what made it effective so that we could keep these aspects for the final poster as well as how we could improve these images.From this we knew that the use of shadow and the eye made the poster more pleasing and that to make it better we could try showing more of the killer as well as making it lighter. By making sure that the people we sent the survey to were between the ages of 18-25 we were able to find out what viewers from our target audience thought about our poster, which would help us to decide if our certification of 18 is appropriate.

Once we had further developed our initial idea, we also made sure to ask which development poster they preferred  This was useful as it allowed us to get others thoughts on small details such as the change in font, colour, size of text and the positioning. From this we learnt that the font we had initially used for the title looked too swirly and did not reflect the horror genre of our film successfully. We also found that we needed to move the title towards the top so not to draw away the focus from the shadow.  

Website feedback 

It was also important for us to get feedback from others about our website as a method of checking that it showed the plot,genre, essential information and was easy to use. Once we had created our first draft of the website we sent the link to a focus group and asked them to reply with any comments. This was useful as it helped us see that we had made it easy to co-ordinate and suited the horror genre successfully as well as giving us improvements. Popular comments given for improvements was that we should include a live twitter feed and include reviews for the film.We then took this into account and incorporated these changes into our final website to make it better suited to the audience.  

Using Social media:

One method we used to promote our marketing package was the use of social media in order to use links to gain feedback and support for our product. Through creating a Twitter account and Facebook page for our film we were able to gain recognition from many viewers who then gave us helpful comments. However, looking back we feel that we could have gained more feedback if we had also posted our trailer on the Facebook and Twitter site as this would have generated more comments.