Media Evaluation Question 3

Media evaluation Question 3 Ryan Roche

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Here is an Audience feedback video. We asked the following questions to a number of people and compiled the footage to make the video.

The questions asked in the video were:

Overall do you think out trailer followed conventions of a typical horror movie trailer?

Did the trailer reveal a lot of information about the story line?

Do you think the music needs to be changed?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfG6jRrIiaE&feature=player_embedded

After assessing our audience feedback we were able to see the trailer from an audience perspective, as oppose to a creators. Our group decided that we should promote our trailer too all kinds of people via the web. After putting our trailer on youtube.com, we started promoting the trailer further as the comments on youtube.com had already started coming in. As we all had facebook accounts and it was easily accessible, we also uploaded the trailer on to facebook.com and asked other users to watch the trailer and give their feedback. Due to the extraordinary amount of users on the social networking site, we received a large amount of feedback ranging from constructive criticisms and helpful advice to the good parts of the trailer.

Our trailer, entitled ‘Keys’ is a fictional story of a janitor who seeks pleasure from abducting, torturing and usually killing young students who stay late after college, mainly females. I believe the main reason for our trailer collecting mainly positive feedback is because before we made it we handed out a questionnaire to a number of different people asking what they would like and expect from a horror movie trailer. After carefully assessing the data, we were able to understand key concepts of horror trailers people preferred to see. For example a large number of people enjoyed seeing frightening parts that made them jump, whilst a minority preferred a slow paced tense trailer.

After a few weeks we made a group decision to start analysing the feedback we had already started to receive. Youtube.com gave us our most reliable feedback as comments were given by complete strangers, which eliminate any bias. The audience feedback made it clear that the music played throughout the trailer was not appropriate for the genre of the trailer due to the content of the lyrics, although the instrumental played a big part in helping to create the tense, suspect feeling to the trailer. Some suggested the trailer could benefit by putting a whole new sound track in, however some audience members were in favour of the track, stating the kanye sound track "really topped it off". After a group meeting and hard thinking, plus some instructions from our teacher, we changed the Kanye West sound track with aims to enhance our trailer to an even more professional look. Many audience members who gave feedback stated the use of the ENIGMA CODE was a smart decision and fitted in well with the trailer. Many thought by not revealing the protagonist too much played a huge role in adding the ‘horror’ effect to the trailer, as the audience were able to understand there is a killer at large and have reason to believe it is the school janitor, however has no proof. The main reason for doing this was to please the audience by giving to them what they expected to see. We decided to try and follow some forms and conventions of other teaser trailers and the ENIGMA CODE seemed most relevant to our story line.

Another positive aspect of our audience feedback was people stating the length of our trailer was perfect, as it was the common length for average teaser trailers and gave us enough time to create the trailer how we thought the audience would like it. However, whilst we were focusing on making our trailer a specific time, we had to be very precise and careful about what footage we should use. This involved us coming together as a group and deciding which footage is most effective and which should be scrapped. I believe our group could have benefited from posting clips of unused footage on the internet and asking the audience for feedback with regards to which footage we should have kept, as we then could have made some amendments to the trailer to make it better.

Whilst facebook.com and youtube.com were proving to be helpful resources for collecting audience feedback, we were thinking of new ways of promoting our video. We were always promoting the video by word of mouth and urging friends, family and strangers to log on to the internet and give feedback to our video, however we still felt this was not enough. We decided to send our trailer via email to each person on our contact lists, asking them to follow the link to watch our trailer, leave feedback and reply with a more in depth bit of feedback. This is a common promotion technique used by many promoters and we also believed we could benefit from starting our own viral campaign. One user in particular kindly took time to reply personally, giving constructive criticism, addressing the good bits and made relative reference to the use of mis-en-scene, which not many members of the audience mentioned. We were grateful for this as we were not familiar with receiving feedback with such content. The user also stated that we did well to make the horror trailer seem professional although the majority of our shots were taken in bright, sunny conditions, in and around our college. I took time to have a look at fellow media students’ trailers to compare and see where we could have improved. I also decided to have a brief look at the feedback given to the trailers which was similar to ours, to see if our trailer could relate. Again I noticed the audience observing the duration of the trailer and giving positive feedback with regards to fitting it in with the common duration of teaser trailers, which is anything from around 0:45 – 1:00.

Although the time worked well with our trailer, the other parts of the audience feedback have helped me to understand the trailer could have been slightly improved. Due to filming restrictions we were only allowed to film during the day within the college grounds. With reference to the audience feedback, it seems that the trailer would have been much more effective if it contained some night scenes. Before filming we had considered how we would be able to include some scenes which were low key lit, but weren’t able to film after college hours, so decided to use a ‘blue screen’ background and the necessary lighting to create the dark effect. Although this worked well for our trailer, it still did not make up for the natural outdoor night scenes we could have filmed.

After analysing all the feedback and where it came from, we noticed that facebook.com got our video the biggest response. I think this was mainly due to the ‘share’ button. Whilst each member of our group were promoting our trailer on our Facebook pages and were awaiting responses, we also urged other facebook users to click the ‘share’ button, which then automatically posts out trailer on their homepage. This helped promote the video to a wider audience. As facebook.com was where many other media students were promoting their trailer, we were able to swap feedback which meant we were getting feedback from other young film makers. This helped as the feedback made relevant reference to the trailer, giving advice and ideas from other young creative minds. We also needed to generate some feedback for our magazine front cover and movie poster, so decided to promote them in the same ways we did our trailer. The most noticeable feedback was members of the audience stating they were happy to see similarities between the trailer and ancillary texts. For example, the colour scheme used for the magazine front cover was the same used in parts of the trailer. We managed to achieve this effect by using Adobe Photoshop. In order to get the ‘greyish’ effect we had to colour grade the photo and change the colour curves. We also used similar, if not the same fonts to keep that continuous effect flowing. Some audience members stated that the use of keys throughout each piece worked really well, especially as the trailer was called keys and the protagonist was the janitor of a school building.

Overall I believe our trailer generated the most feedback, however it had more time to recieve more feedback. From the audience feedback it was made clear that some audience members thought we could benefit from more footage, however thought the footage that was their was good. If I had a chance to re-do the coursework I would change the music played throughout the trailler from the start, and try to include many more of the scenes that my group filmed. Overall I think the audience was pleased with our final product.