Evaluation Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is incredibly important for the production of a film as it allows

you to receive the non-bias opinions of your target audience on your product.
When working on something it is easy over look small errors as you are so
focused on the end goal. For example, you may change an aspect of your
product later on in your production schedule and forget to add/remove
something from earlier on in the production, causing confusion for the audience.
Your opinion on your own product is, naturally, very bias, so you will often need
criticism to keep your product in check. However, we found that not all responses
were serious and this wasted a lot of time when we were reading through, which
is a draw back about the survey being anonymous and easily accessible.
There were two main ways we gathered audience feedback on our product.
Firstly, we created an online survey on SurveyMonkey asking our target audience
what they liked about horror films and for their opinions on our films premise.
The feedback we received was vital in shaping our overall trailer. One key piece
of feedback from this was that someone said the plot sounded very much like an
episode of Doctor Who, which we didnt initially notice. To differentiate ourselves
we realized we would have to focus more on the slasher sub-genre.
Secondly, we held screenings in class where we watched each groups trailer and
gave individual feedback on what we saw. The aspects of our trailer that
gathered attention during this screening were our sound levels and some
confusion with the story line. Everyone agreed that our sound levels were a little
unbalanced and that it was hard to hear the dialogue over the music and sound
effects. We took this onboard and made the simple changes to the volume and
clarity of the sound clips.
One person pointed out that it looked like the main antagonist in the film died
during the trailer and that this gave the entire plot away. It was not our intention
for people to actually think it was dead because the following scene shows it rise
up and attack again. Our group agreed that this needed clarification so we added
a light effect to the mannequin to show that it is not defeated, whist also
maintaining some suspense.
We were also constantly getting feedback from our peers in class when we were
working on both our trailer and individual work. This helped me a lot as I had a
lot of initial ideas which I had to whittle down when working on my
poster/magazine front cover. One comment I got a lot was that my poster looked
more sci-fi than horror due to the colours and font used. I decided to change the
whole layout of the poster and am a lot happier with the outcome.