What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

When producing an advertising campaign, audience feedback is extremely important because without an audience, a film cannot be successful. The audience are the people who pay to go and see the film. Without people willing to pay to see your film; your film will not make money.
The Woman in Black is an example of a film which had a very large advertisement campaign in order to attract as wide an audience as possible. Adverts were spread everywhere, Daniel Radcliffe partook in numerous interviews and the film had an active online presence during production. These all contributed to the film’s success.

Audience feedback online would be generated by how many people share the videos/pictures/files. On YouTube or Facebook, it would be generated by how many likes and/or dislikes the content gets. The more likes and shares, and a bigger response your content gets, the more popular your film will likely be. If a film is released and it doesn’t have a large following, chances are it won’t succeed in the box-office, as no one will know about the film when it comes out.

We received feedback from fellow class members at set-up screenings in class. We watched each other’s trailers and gave appraisal. The feedback for the first draft of our trailer can be seen in the video. Beyond this, I shown my trailer to my friends and family, and they also told me where I could improve. On a closer level, whenever one of our group made a change to a part of the trailer, the other members of the group would offer constructive criticism.

This method is very similar to how we received feedback for our individual posters and magazine covers. We would each give comments, and I asked my friends and family for their opinions, and I worked everyone’s suggestions into each product.

For the trailer, before we even started filming, our group sent out questionnaires asking people about what they like to see in horror films, and whether or not trailers sway their opinion on whether they should watch a film or not.

I also received feedback after the completion of the ancillary texts through the form of questionnaires. This helped to establish whether or not my products would be effective, had the film been real.

The feedback that our group received in-class was by far the most helpful. Probably the most concerning criticism we had for our first draft was that people were left confused as to what happened. They said that there was no story or progression. When another person pointed out that there was a lack of inter-titles, we knew then that including them would help make the whole trailer make more sense.
Another big criticism was related to the entire first portion of the trailer, where Simon – my character – and Alex are talking happily in a car, going out for a drive. We decided not to include audio on this part because the music would be more powerful. However, according to some people, it was a bit disorientating to have what is essentially silence right at the beginning of the trailer, in shots where there should clearly be people talking. It didn’t help establish an initial tone, and this is something we took quite seriously.

The music was a kind of 50:50 split. About half of our class members liked the music, and the other half disagreed saying it would fit better with a different genre, such as action. Genre confusion came up quite a lot in this feedback session. One shot at the end where I am standing perfectly still not answering a question, according to one student, actually gave the impression of a comedy rather than a horror.

Other criticisms we received were related to the brightness of the shots: they were too brightly lit and didn’t feel very scary. Someone else pointed out that it took quite a long time for the trailer to pick up the pace and become more horror-like. The only other major constructive criticism we received was related to the balance between the talking and the music (in certain shots the music over-powers the speech) and also the visual quality of some shots (one in particular of Alex’s eye which lingered for quite a bit longer than it should have).

The positive feedback we received in the same session was also very helpful. A lot of people liked the choice of music, despite some being confused by it. It was pointed out that some of the shots had angles which were a little bit more unusual than some of the others (such as the previously mentioned shot of Alex’s eye), and these were fairly well received. Our peers also liked the shots where I had changed the speed to slow down or speed up half way through. Generally, the editing and camera work were among the best features of our trailer, according to the feedback.

I used pretty much all of this feedback when finalising the trailer, magazine cover and poster.
In order to sort out the issues with the trailer’s story, our group decided to add inter-titles. These would loosely explain what’s happening in the shots, but not reveal too much about the film’s plot, in order to avoid spoilers.

The music, we decided to keep the same, but I actually slightly changed it towards the end to fit better with the progression of the shots.

Because one of the major issues was the beginning of the trailer, we inevitably almost completely changed it. We added more sound effects in order to make it clearer that we have a car crash, and my character is killed. We completely removed the shots of Simon and Alex talking in order to completely eliminate any confusion risen with our characters.

Because certain shots looked a bit amateurish, I added more visual effects. And on the one particular shot of Alex’s eye, I cut it short so that it no longer lingers.