What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We screened a rough cut of our trailer to a group of people with a similar demographic to that of our target audience (mostly male teenagers).

The primary target audience for our film is teenage to mid-twenty year old males, however this demographic of audience often brings a secondary audience to the film; teenage to mid-twenty year old females as research has shown more mixed sex groups and couples are now watching horror together. Due to the age of this audience and the niche genre of the film (British horror) I would pitch the film to mainly the psychographc group "reformers" as they would be more broad minded with their views on a less mainstream film.

We screened a rough cut of our trailer to our media class; the age and gender break-down of the class was very close to that of our target audience, however it is difficult to judge their psychographic segmentation. The purpose of this screening was to enable us to re-edit our trailer based upon the praise and criticisms our trailer had received to ensure that the product had the desired effect upon the target audience. The test group viewed our trailer whilst making notes on its failures and success' as both and trailer and a horror text. Each individual then voiced their opinion as to key points that could be improved or that they liked, we then made a note of everything that had been said and later assessed which critisms occurred most often, or could be most easily solved.

From this screening we gained valuable feedback which enabled us to re-edit our trailer to please the TA and improve the finish of the final product. It also helped us to iron out practical issues concerning our trailer such as font size and duration of inter-titles. However the reliability and validity of the method is questionable as we used a small sample size (approximately 20 individuals), therefore the method lacks population validity. The implications of this is that a decision to change an element of the trailer could be based on very few peoples opinions; if a different sample was used the psychographics of the group, and therfore the outcome, could have been different. To reduce the effect of this we had to ensure we only made changes when a majority agreed or when we ourselves saw fit.



Plot


The reoccurring issue that was uncovered with regards to the plot of the trailer was that in the original cut the car crash/break-down was caused by a ghost-like creature that stood in the road. This idea was criticised for two reasons, firstly people felt that this mixed too different horror sub-genres, supernatural and gore. Although it is possible for there to be some cross-over of genres within films, I believe this particular idea wasn't effective due to the duration of a teaser trailer; it was hard to make all the idea's within the original plot for the film coherent within the limited amount of time the trailer was allowed to last. Another issue the audience had was what the "ghost" in the road was, and what relation it had to the film. I believe that the main issue with conveying why the car had stopped was that on a low budget it was difficult to effectively film the "ghost" in the road. Due to the confusion the idea of the supernatural being involved caused, we decided to remove this idea altogether. I believe that this was a good decision as a trailer should only reveal enough of the plot to make the audience want to see the whole film, not reveal the whole plot; now when the audience view the film they will be surprised by the involvement of the supernatural, therefore buying a ticket will seem worth while as they now have the inside knowledge.

Our target audience did, however, feel that we may have revealed too much of the plot in showing the final girl  running out of the door. We decided not to change this as we believe that this action was made more ambiguous by the farmer dragging a fork at the end. Also false clues may be given away in a trailer so that there is a shock factor when the audience see the film.

The audience also felt that there needed to be something to bridge the gap between the in car shots and walking to the house. We originally used a voice over which we attempted to make sound digetic, to explain the link between the car and the house, however this was too abrupt. In order to fix this we used a scene we had shot of the bonnet up on the car and characters conversing about the situation to make the trailer more coherent.

Camera work

We gained both positive and negative feedback about the shots we used. The audience sample was split when it came to deciding whether the final shot of the farmer dragging the fork was too classically framed. We believe that the long shot is more eerie and leaves you with a lasting image, especially when teamed with the sound of the fork drag. However others believed that a close up or a different angle would have made the shot fit with the horror conventions better. We decided to break this convention as in doing so I believe the shot becomes more prominent and stands out amongst the cantered angles and close ups used earlier on in the trailer; it may connote the isolation that the farmer would feel from the death of his son.

The audience did agree that the close ups of the key and gear stick at the beginning of the trailer were effective in establishing the location. They also likes the fact that we had filmed some footage on a lesser quality handy-cam to make it feel as though it was real footage the "monster" had recorded. This is an idea often used in horror as it gives a feel of realism; by making the horror more realistic it also makes it more terrifying as it could happen to you. The point of view shots were also praised, these are useful in trailers as they immediately put the audience in the eyes of the characters making them empathise with them in the limited time a teaser trailer lasts.

Digetic and non-digetic sounds


There were a few synchronicity issues that our audience feedback brought to our attention. In places the dialogue did not match up to the action and I noticed myself that the sound levels weren't correct at times as much of the dialogue was recorded after the shots were taken. We tweaked this in order to give the product a  high quality finish.

The audience feedback was mainly positive about the way we had used sound. They liked that the soundtrack didn't come in until later. In most trailers the music builds throughout the trailer as ours does, however we broke the traditional trailer convention of having music over the visuals from the beginning. I believe the soundtrack only starting when the characters reach the house acts as a discourse marker for when the disequilibrium is about to occur; it marks a change in tone. The soundtrack that members of our group created  is juxtaposed to the visuals of gore as the guitar is almost calming, I believe this adds another dimension to the trailer and plays with the audiences emotions, it connotes that the suffering is about more than just sadistic male, it is about an emotional response this male has to his sons death. This idea is not made apparent in the film, however the music suggests that the plot is more deep and tragic than the visuals suggest. The audience also commented that the music gave " a good British horror feel" therefore our choice of soundtrack fits with the conventions of British horror that we were aiming for.

The audience also gave positive comments about the non-digetic sound of radio static used over the inter-titles, this idea was used to give the trailer coherence as the idea of the car at the beginning is carried through the trailer by using sound.

The biggest piece of constructive criticism about we gained about the sound through the audience feedback, was that the voice over was not liked. We attempted to make the voice over used in our rough cut sound as though it was digetic, however this was not effective using the voice over software on final cut pro. Therefore we decided to record the dialogue outside on camcorders so that more ambient sounds would be included in the recording (such as wind and cars). This was successful in creating a less artificial sound, however a visual was still needed to link the two scenes, henze the bonnet scene.


Inter-titles 
 The inter-titles from our rough cut received much criticism. Some people thought that font was too simple, some people thought the font was too large and some thought they needed to be on the screen for longer. They also thought that we would benefit from having more inter-titles to explain the plot and ease the confusion. There was an obvious need to tweak the inter-titles therefore we added another inter-title to guide the audience through the trailer. We also adjusted the effects we put on the font and the transitions used. We made "would you trust a" fade before the word "stranger" to isolate the word, reinforcing its importance. This inter-title plays on the epithet that children are taught to not trust strangers, which harks back to Freudian ideas of psychological abnormalities being caused by unresolved memories from your childhood. Also the idea of childhood innocence is played upon linking to Levi-Strauss's narrative structure theory of a narrative  being explained in terms of binary oppositions, in this case childhood innocence and corruption; this is a theme generic of the horror genre.