Evaluation

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

It is imperative to have feedback from the audience in every stage from the research to the construction of the film trailer to make sure that it appeals greatly to them. We are an independent film company and it is important to make the ancillary tasks; my magazine and poster, allure the audience as they're likely to attract more people to the film. If my film trailer, magazine and poster don't appeal to my target audience then my film will likely be unsuccessful and tarnish the name of the production company.

I began by collecting qualitative research which is primarily exploratory research and is used to gain insight into opinions and reasons. We devled into this task by using the survey development website SurveyMonkey.com. Using this website helped me to collect information from my target audience and this was extremley useful as I was able to understand what I needed to plan and what things people would like to see from my trailer. I asked questions such as ‘Who is your favourite slasher movie villain?’ to which people replied Freddy Kruger and from this I learnt that people would probably like to see a villain with burns such as Kruger’s so we used this information and created a villain whose backstory included them being set alight and deformed with burns. Accumulating qualitative feeback helped me understand my targeted demographic clearer and I was also assured that my trailer would be successful and well liked. Seeing that most of the feedback we got was from 15-17 year olds we decided to have the rating of the film be a 15 as this way the feeback that we gathered would be sensical to apply to our film. From our qualitative audience feedback we were able to learn how to improve our trailer so that it would be able to appeal to the majority of people.

I also collected quantitative research which is collecting numerical date that can be transformed to useable statistics. I did this to get feedback on my ancillary tasks of a poster and a magazine. I wanted to find out what layout would appeal to my target audience efficaciously. I thirty five of my peers which poster and magazine appealed to them the most and presented my feedback in a chart. The audience feedback helped me to learn which magazine and poster would be the most attractive to people and would appeal to their preferences. I took this feedback on board and made sure to use the most popular layout for my final product. The audience feedback helped me to learn the best way to increase the appeal for my media products is research and using the feedback to your advantage.

An intelligent way to portray how an independent film company can rely on targeting the film trailer towards opinion leaders is the two step flow model. The two step hypothesis was developed by Katz and Lazarsfeld. It explains how opinion leaders get information from a media source and then pass the information down to friends, family and their acquaintances. The audience will inform consumers of our trailer and this will make it a trending topic and the feeback is useful to help us learn what we could have improved. This is why we carried out a focus group for people to be able to see and evaluate our full trailer. We asked randomly selected teenagers aged 15-18 to a screening and this would give us feedback on the final product and would also give us a wide range of repsonses. I tried to make sure that there were both males and females during the screening so that my results would be unbiased and reliable. After the group watched the trailer I asked the six questions and collected their feedback on paper which was a way to assure everyone would answer the questions. I asked:

1. What aspects of the trailer would you say are typical of slasher trailers?

2. From the trailer, what do you understand of the story?

3. What in the trailer do you find tense and or scary? 

4. What do you like or dislike about the trailer?

5. What could we improve?

6. How does the sound impact the effectiveness of the trailer?

After looking at the different responses I gained a lot of insight as people were speaking candidly of the trailer; what was good and what could be better. I was pleased to see that the narrative could be seen clearly by people and that they understood the story of the bullied Killer seeking vengeance. They did suggest that the sound quality be better as a few were unable to hear the sentences being uttered. Hearing this we made the decision to dub some sentences and made sure that the lines could be heard. From doing this focus group I was able to learn that even after doing qualitative research and taking it on board there will be a handful of things that you can improve to make your work infallible. My audience feedback really helped me to learn what I would improve if I were to do this again.

To collect responses from a more varied audience we decided to share the trailer on social media website YouTube and Facebook. This allowed our trailer to be international and also made sure we collected differentiated results. Collecting differentiated audience feedback was really helpful in aiding us to understand what kinds of people would like our film and ways we could improve it to appeal to an international audience. We collected some responses from online comments:

The feedback we collected from social networking websites was increasingly positive because the responses were from our close peers and also online people tend to be more polite with their responses. Many people admitted that they understood it was a revenge story while others praised the makeup of the killer. This made it difficult for me to evaluate the finished trailer. The comments would be more truthful perhaps from people who were complete strangers as they would not be hesitant to speak truthfully of a strangers work. The audience feedback from the social networking websites helped us to learn that the trailer was likeable and did fit into the genre of horror movie in these people’s minds and they were scared by it.

To conclude I have discovered a lot from doing audience research for example by doing research I was able to create a narrative for my trailer that would appeal best to my audience. I was also able to see what they liked and disliked about the final product which helped me understand what problems I had and how I would solve them. The sound was the biggest issue when it came to collecting feedback and this inspired me to use voiceovers and dubbing to make the dialogue clearer. Finally the feedback allowed my ancillary tasks to be the best suited for my audience and appeal to them greatly. Without audience feedback I would not have created a film trailer that would appeal to people in the best way.