To show what we have learned from our audience feedback, we reflected on feedback we have already received throughout the development of the project and also used different methods to obtain new feedback about our finished trailer, poster and magazine cover.
Our survey...
We decided to do another survey to assess how good the audience found elements of our trailer, magazine and poster. Here are the questions we asked. We provided different answers to the questions and we asked people to fill it out.
-How was our trailer?
-Did the trailer make you want to watch the film? -Did the music make the trailer more tense and scary? -Did you notice the non-diegetic sound effects that were added in? -What effect did they have on the trailer? -What images were most effective and eye catching? -Did you notice the darkening effects and did they make any difference to your viewing experience? |
-Were the titles easy to follow?
-Was it clear what our genre was? -What age range was our target audience? -Did you like the mix of male and female victims? -Did you feel our trailer had a clear setting? -What is effective about our magazine? -What is effective about our poster? -Do our poster, trailer and magazine tie in together? -Did you feel our trailer got scarier as it developed? |
The results
Reaction Survey
We asked 10 people the questions. / = 1 vote for that answer
How was our trailer?
Did the trailer make you want to watch the film?
Did the music make the trailer more tense and scary?
Did you notice the non-diegetic sound effects that were added in?
If you noticed, what effect did they have on the trailer?
What images were most effective and eye catching?
Did you notice the darkening effects and did they make any difference to your viewing experience?
Did you feel our trailer got scarier as it developed?
Were the titles easy to follow?
Was it clear what our genre was?
What age range was our target audience?
Did you like the mix of male and female victims?
Did you feel our trailer had a clear setting?
What is effective about our magazine?
What is effective about our poster?
Do our poster, trailer and magazine tie in together?
We asked 10 people the questions. / = 1 vote for that answer
How was our trailer?
- Interesting ////
- Exciting /
- Scary ///
- Tense /
- Boring /
Did the trailer make you want to watch the film?
- Yes ///////
- No ///
Did the music make the trailer more tense and scary?
- Yes //////////
- No
Did you notice the non-diegetic sound effects that were added in?
- Yes ///////
- No ///
If you noticed, what effect did they have on the trailer?
- Made it scarier ///
- Made it more tense //
- Made you focus on it more /
- Made it less effective /
What images were most effective and eye catching?
- Graves /
- Outdoor shots of the setting //
- Shots of the killer //
- The park shots /
- Shots of blood and gore //
- Action shots (people being put in boot/people being killed) //
Did you notice the darkening effects and did they make any difference to your viewing experience?
- Yes I saw them and yes they made it better /////
- Yes I saw them but they made no difference /
- No I didn’t notice ////
Did you feel our trailer got scarier as it developed?
- Yes ////////
- No //
Were the titles easy to follow?
- Yes they could be read easily and I understood them /////////
- Yes I could read them but they didn’t make sense to me /
- They were too quick to read
- They were unclear
Was it clear what our genre was?
- Yes ////////
- No //
What age range was our target audience?
- 15-18 ////////
- 18-21 //
- 21+
Did you like the mix of male and female victims?
- Yes it was interesting /////////
- No it was not good /
Did you feel our trailer had a clear setting?
- Yes /////////
- No /
What is effective about our magazine?
- Text /
- Images ////
- Layout //
- Colours used /
- Information given //
What is effective about our poster?
- Text //
- Images ///
- Layout /
- Colours used ///
- Information given /
Do our poster, trailer and magazine tie in together?
- Yes //////////
- No
Our response to feedback we got before we started the project...
Response-
Although this was our initial idea when we planned our trailer, we chose to use one main soundtrack that would be scary and build tension because we tried to begin the trailer with contrapuntal sound, but we felt the effect we desired wasn't quite achieved. |
Response-
We stuck to this idea and showed mostly female murder victims in our horror. But to try and challenge conventions, we have also showed male victims. We felt this would catch the audience's interest and make our horror stand out from others. |
Response-
The majority of our settings are more rural, the park, the church and the graveyard all feature greenery. We avoided urban settings because we wanted to link our trailer to the theory of Wes craven's that says that horrors are more scary when they're in rural settings because that seems to make the characters more isolated. |
Reaction Videos...
We decided to film some reactions to our trailer and then we analysed what the reactions said about our work
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What these clips showed us...
- In both reaction videos, the viewers keep watching the trailer all the way to the end which must mean that it is gripping
- Keiran laughed at the start but we think this is because he was nervous about being filmed
- Ella said she liked the establishing shots of the setting so we can infer they were shot and edited well
- Both viewers gasped when the music got more tense, this shows that the music must have been appropriate for our trailer and must have helped to build an atmosphere
- By the end of the trailer, both viewers look shocked by the blood and gore they can see, this shows that our props were effective
- Ella said the trailer was really good and Keiran said he would like to watch the film so clearly our trailer fulfilled its purpose and successfully made viewers tempted to see the film
- Both viewers successfully read and understood the titles so we can infer that they were appropriate, eye-catching and clear
More reactions to our work...
We decided to quote some of the things people said about our trailer and then work out what we could improve from them.
'The trailer is interesting because there's so many different locations.' - Beth Acton, a friend who has no media studies experience
We are happy that this is noticeable when watching our trailer because showing variety in our locations was one of our main concerns. There are over 10 different locations across the trailer including a real graveyard, the inside and outside of churches, a park, a house and lots of different rural locations.
We could improve our trailer by adding more locations again and perhaps by using more memorable symbolism to link the locations together to create an overall message about the trailer. Alternatively, our group agreed that it would be interesting to see what kind of response we would receive if our trailer only featured scenes from a very limited number of locations. We feel the responses from a trailer with loads of locations compared to a trailer with only 1 or 2 featured locations would be interesting because the majority of trailers we studied for research have a lot of different locations.
We could improve our trailer by adding more locations again and perhaps by using more memorable symbolism to link the locations together to create an overall message about the trailer. Alternatively, our group agreed that it would be interesting to see what kind of response we would receive if our trailer only featured scenes from a very limited number of locations. We feel the responses from a trailer with loads of locations compared to a trailer with only 1 or 2 featured locations would be interesting because the majority of trailers we studied for research have a lot of different locations.
'The trailer would be better with more dialogue.' -One of our media teachers
This was a piece of feedback we received from our teacher after we had finished our project. Originally, our trailer had a running commentary speech layered across the entire trailer, detailing the motive of the grave filler. The same teacher helped us to decide that this was not particularly effective because we mis-casted the voice of the voice over because she didn't sound scary enough. Also, the person's voice that we used doesn't actually feature in the trailer, so we were concerned that it would cause confusion. This caused us to rethink and then we came across the idea of no dialouge at all!
Although many trailers feature dialogue, we (Sophie in particular) was inspired to limit our dialogue by the very recent 2016 film Hush. We chose this because the film 'holds a 94% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 16 reviews and has an average rating of 7.8/10'.- Wikipedia.
Because it is such a highly rated film, even though it features barely any dialogue, we decided we would try to continue the theme of silence in our trailer and trial its effectiveness. We concluded that the lack of dialouge in Hush is so interesting and entertaining because the silence and questions the moving images would pose for the audience creates so much tension and suspense. We hoped that our trailer would have a similar effect.
We feel it does have a spooky effect because the audience sees horrible blood and wounds caused by the mysterious masked grave filler killer and the innocence of the adults and children being captured, possibly tortured and killed; but, they hear no voices or opinion from the killer or victims. The silence matched with the gory shots makes the audience feel tense.
However, if we could have more time on this project we would have liked to make an alternative trailer that does have a lot of dialouge to compare the responses. Other than our teacher's comment, our feedback has been good and others who have watched our trailer, media students and non media students, have not commented on the tense silence in our trailer negatively.
Although many trailers feature dialogue, we (Sophie in particular) was inspired to limit our dialogue by the very recent 2016 film Hush. We chose this because the film 'holds a 94% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 16 reviews and has an average rating of 7.8/10'.- Wikipedia.
Because it is such a highly rated film, even though it features barely any dialogue, we decided we would try to continue the theme of silence in our trailer and trial its effectiveness. We concluded that the lack of dialouge in Hush is so interesting and entertaining because the silence and questions the moving images would pose for the audience creates so much tension and suspense. We hoped that our trailer would have a similar effect.
We feel it does have a spooky effect because the audience sees horrible blood and wounds caused by the mysterious masked grave filler killer and the innocence of the adults and children being captured, possibly tortured and killed; but, they hear no voices or opinion from the killer or victims. The silence matched with the gory shots makes the audience feel tense.
However, if we could have more time on this project we would have liked to make an alternative trailer that does have a lot of dialouge to compare the responses. Other than our teacher's comment, our feedback has been good and others who have watched our trailer, media students and non media students, have not commented on the tense silence in our trailer negatively.
'The trailer seems realistic because it matches the poster and magazine cover and features all the conventional things you see on a trailer like a distribution company clip.' Joe Wright, a friend and media student
We are pleased that this observation was made because we worked hard to ensure that we made our trailer, magazine and poster realistic. Examples of how we made sure we did this could be the distribution and production company clips in the trailer, tied with the date of release, the hashtag and the social media icons. On our poster, we have shown the hashtag in continuation with our trailer. We have also included the same slogan that we show in our trailer. Our magazine continues the same sort of colour scheme and same theme in terms of the relevant images from our trailer we used. To continue to be successful with this, if we had more time, we could have planned a bigger advertising campaign which could utilise social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We could post mini teaser clips, tweet a countdown of days left until the film is in cinemas and circulate information about The Grave Filler to gain public attention.
Poster evaluation... |
Magazine evaluation... |
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Poster survey |
Magazine survey |
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Conclusion...
Overall, we felt that our audience feedback was really helpful to us when trying to make choices about our trailer, poster and magazine throughout the project because it showed us what kind of thing people are most interested in. We all agreed that making something the audience wants to see is the most important thing if you are hoping to profit from your project and create something that is going to be popular.
Our feedback also showed us what we need to work harder on in future and what we could change which was helpful. Some of these things are that if we had more time, we could have had a bigger advertising campaign and we could have made another trailer with more dialogue in to see which people prefer.
Our feedback also showed us what we need to work harder on in future and what we could change which was helpful. Some of these things are that if we had more time, we could have had a bigger advertising campaign and we could have made another trailer with more dialogue in to see which people prefer.
-CH