Evaluation question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
We decided that we wanted to create a psychological thriller based around a serial killer as we were inspired by the psychological genre through films such as Seven, Side effects, Stoker and Silence of the lambs. We came up with the idea of the killer being obsessed by homeless people and wanting to rid the earth of them. Our target audience is people aged 15 to 22 and to gage their opinion on the title and tag line we created a survey monkey. We posted the survey to social media and got some of our peers to fill it out. We created a quick synopsis of the film idea before our target audience answered the questions. We took the most popular of these to use as our final title and tag line.

After we finished our first draft of the trailer we got feedback from social media that our sound did not build up enough, there wasn't as much tension built as we would have liked. We then edited the sound to include booms when the killer was shown and cut some of the non-deigetic sound from earlier in the trailer to make it build up more. Also the trailer was a little too long than a normal teaser trailer so we cut it down shots that we thought were unnecessary such as some establishing shots of the location as they did not add anything to the audiences understanding of the narrative.

We also had comments that one of the scenes of the killer in his house was not as effective as it could be because of the lighting and the mise en scene, so we had to reshoot this. We found that the second time that we shot this the lighting was much more effective. 

We then took feedback from a focus group and found that the genre was quite easily identified but that the narrative was slightly unclear as we did not include any dead bodies "narrative was a little bit confusing" At this point we were unable to re-film so we couldn't include any more clues such as body parts. Although others disagreed and thought that the fact that we only gave clues to the narrative was effective and made them as audience want to see it "As I was unsure of the storyline, it makes me want to watch it" Also the restrictions on the length of the trailer due to its form, a teaser trailer, meant that we could not reveal too much of the narrative.  Some of the focus group couldn't understand that the girls were killed although this was explicitly explained in a news report on the radio at the beginning of the trailer. Our peers found the typography most effective and thought that it worked well with the killers journal "Amazing, the hand written words were so good"

We also created a survey and posted it to social media to gain some criticism although this did not get many responses. We found that the area that our peers thought needed most work was the lighting although we were not able to change this in post production. We also took feedback on the most effective parts of the trailer.  

Overall we found the audience feedback to be useful in changing the trailer slightly so that it was the most effective it could be to an audience. We found that using the surveys to gain the opinion on things such as the title and tag line was very useful as we could get direct feedback from our target audience. Next time we will get feedback from our target audience earlier so that if we need to re-film anything then we can.