What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback has been useful and taught me a lot of things about what our target audience want in a trailer, and more importantly a horror trailer. Pre-production and post-production audience feedback and research have helped us in our ideas to produce and develop our product, as well as giving us feedback about what our target audience thought worked well in our trailer, and what they thought could have been a bit better.

Before we began our trailer, or even thought towards it, we used www.surveymonkey.com to produce a multiple choice questionnaire about horror films and what our audience found scary, and more importantly, who our audience was! Once we collected the data we took our findings to begin thinking towards the plot line for our trailer. We knew, as a group, that we wanted our plot line to follow many standard horror conventions but with a twist, to make our trailer stand out and want our audience to want to watch the film (even though of course we were only making the trailer). One question we asked was to do with what our audience found scary, and one of the options was religion and religious iconography, which we knew we were already going to base our plot line around as it is a topic that, although controversial and sometimes shockingly scary, isn’t used in horror enough. But we used the rest of the information to think of other things we could include in our trailer.  We found that our audience found psychologically frightening things scary too, so we thouyght that combining the idea of religious iconography with a psychological plotline would allow us to think of something scary. After all, cults are people who have become so obsessed with a certain idea, often religious, which allows us to create a plot line around psychology. We found that people found ‘gore’ quite scary and shocking, so we thought we’d include that in our trailer (resulting in the scenes of the slit wrists and the crucifix engraved in the chest).

Once our trailer was complete we had it shown to different groups of people - one of them being our media class who had been set the same task of producing a horror film trailer. We all gave each other feedback on each others trailers which I felt was a good idea as we had all been using the same software and equipment to produce the final outcomes and we all understood how much effort had been put into each trailer. As well as this we showed our trailer to some of our friends as well as mutual friends who we felt would give us an honest answer on how good our trailer was, and how it could be improved.

One thing we learned from our audience research was that people weren’t too keen on the music. Some people felt that it didn’t flow well with the actual imagery and didn’t fit in too well with the horror conventions. Another thing we found was that people didn’t like the end of our music, however this wasn’t how it was supposed to be because we were trying to find a piece of music that was epically horror for the very end where our title appeared, but whilst doing our last minute tweaking to the trailer we never got round to actually finding the perfect piece of music for the ending, which meant when the title appeared there was no music playing as it had come to an instant end - which we also didn’t like just as much as our audience. However if we were given more time I know we would have made the music fit in better with the rest of the trailer.

Another thing that also didn't go down too well was the actual scare factor of our trailer, because although our plot line, I feel, is quite scary, I don’t think our trailer portrays it to the scariest it could be. Pre-production we had all these extravagant ideas of shots of crucification and other crazy ideas which weren’t really possible on the tight time schedule we had. But I personally feel that the trailer is still scary in a sense, with the use of binary opposites with the little girl, but possibly not too its full potential. Our audience feedback about this was that we needed to maybe make the plot line a little bit more obvious in the actual trailer, because although we tried to stick to horror conventions by giving only a little bit away to entice the audience into watching the whole thing, I don’t think we gave enough away to make it clear what the film was about. I think we could have fixed this problem by including more cult imagery and iconography.

Our audience feedback did also give us a lot of positive feedback about our trailer as well. We included a lot of things in our trailer that people thought worked really well and some even said that they hadn’t seen things like it in previous trailers. For example - our class felt that the typewriter effect of different words and their definitions worked very well, with each word giving more and more away about the film and what happens (words like ‘worship’, all relating to cults and cult rituals). I thought that this worked very well and I’m glad others did. I thought that the quick bursts of quick cuts followed by a black screen with the writing on was a nice touch as well as it broke down the build up and still made the quick, flashy cuts interesting.

Another thing that we learnt from our audience research was that a lot of people liked one thing in particular which we weren’t sure if it would go down well or not - which was using really odd things in our quick cuts, such as the same clip 3 times in a row, really quick to make it look almost twitchy and putting certain clips in reverse so that they went backwards. We weren’t sure if it would work or not, but our audience research shows that people really liked it because it was strange and mysterious. The odd sense of going backwards and forwards of the clips as well I thought worked well in a kind of creepy way - which relates with Bordwell and Thompsons theory of distortions of time and space being used in horror.

So, I learnt a lot from my audience research. Not only did I find out what my audience thought was successful not just as a trailer but as a horror text, I also found our what didn’t exactly work for them and what could have been improved. If given the time again, I know there was many things I’d do to improve my trailer, and possibly gain more and more audience feedback until it was nearly perfect. One of those things would have been what we initially planned as a group before realising how awkward it would be to do - wish was having an actual crucification performed using a large cross and latex and makeup to create wounds - However we went against this in the end because it would be very hard to create and look good, as well as time consuming (considering we didn't have a lot of time we had to decide against it).