What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback has helped me realise what needs to be changed with the trailer and what the audience prefer to what we did.

To get audience feedback from our trailer, we handed out a piece of paper, the picture below is what the paper looked like. It asks the questions, What did you like about the trailer? (1-2 sentences)and the question below this is What do you think could be improved in the trailer (1-2 sentences). This allows the audience to tell us most sides of their opinion of the trailer. This helped us to see what they liked and what they didn't.

The pieces of paper were handed out to a majority of the same people, the majority of people asked to fill out the questions were aged 17 or 18, as this was our target audience. We used younger people in the trailer as we thought this would appeal to the same age group as what we asked the questions to. Usually people watch movies with people their own ages in because they can relate to whats happening. For most horror movies the target audience is 16-24 year old boys, but we decided to look at both boys and girls opinions as they are both as important to the research.
The two highest compliments of the trailer were the shot techniques and the scene where the girl appears in the camera flash. The flash with the girl in was also one of my favourites, it looks like it was a hard scene to make but it really wasn't, all we did was split the camera shot in half and then put a really small clip of the girl in the middle and it worked. At first it was just an accidental experiment that just so happened to turn out to be a really good shot, therefor we used it.

From the sheets we found that our music track in the trailer was really slated. 9 out of 14 people said something about the music needing to be improved which clearly says that the music track was not up to scratch, which in all fairness the music tracks were rushed and some of them were meant to be changed as they were only fillers at the time but they never got changed and ended up being in the trailer when it was shown to the class. Most people said that the music should have been edited to fit the pace of the trailer. This i agree on because towards the end the footage gets quicker but the music doesn't really change in pace. This is probably because at the end its a heartbeat and although the heartbeat does get a tiny bit faster, its not that noticeable, and also we tried to fit the footage to the track and not the track to the footage which may have been a better idea. Something else that the audience thought could be better was the repetition of the scary girl. They thought that she showed up in far to many places, far to many times. I also agree with this as it takes away the scariness of the girl. The more someone see something they more they become used to it, which is why the girl shouldn't of been shown as often as she was. I also disagree with this statement because although she did appear maybe too many times, the places that she appeared in were clever and scary, like in a cupboard and behind people and in the camera flash.Most people said that the actual horror content was quite scary and jumpy at times. One other person said that because the girl appeared so many times it was funny.

The criticisms and compliments of the trailer have taught me that different people have different opinions but they matter as they are the audience and the audience would be the ones to pay to see this movie and if the trailer isn't good enough then no-one would go to watch the movie. Its also taught me that audience feedback and audience research are really important and perhaps the group should have paid more attention to this instead of going by what we thought would be good.