3. What have you learnt through audience feedback?

This was an important process for us to evaluate whether our media piece was successful in terms of what our audience wanted. We used a variety of online tools as well as other methods to gain the feedback.

Media Screening

The screening enabled us to gain feedback from other media students. The graphs below show the results of the questionnaire they answered. From analysing the results, we found that the audience thought that the trailer fitted the intended genre ‘perfectly well’, of which the majority correctly thought as the horror genre.

Although, the most popular sub-genre the audience established in our trailer was psychological, when it is slasher, suggesting that we did not make it evident enough that it was this sub-genre. They accurately determined that the target audience would be made up of both males and females over the age of 18.

It was evident that the audience found the props/mise-en-scene the most effective element in the trailer, especially the make-up, where some commented that it was very impressive. In addition to this, the top three most memorable moments for our audience in our trailer was the make-up, the close-up of Emily’s eyes and Emily’s character in general. This clearly demonstrates our strengths in the mise-en-scene division, which was an important horror convention in order to make it realistic and scary.

Lighting was our least most effective element in the trailer. The use of dark lighting was needed to create the right horror atmosphere, however we have learnt that it would be better to edit the brightness of our footage in post-production and film the shots in daylight conditions to avoid a grainy picture, which may be the reason for its low ranking.

Social Networking Sites

We used sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to set up pages/accounts on which we constantly uploaded updates, and posted links to our teaser trailer, which also enabled our audience to comment on what they thought. The results are shown below:

This feedback has been very positive, again highlighting the that mise-en-scene was our very strong point. But some constructive criticism has been given, for example we could have used a bigger variety of shots, but the majority stated that it was 'creepy', 'horrendous' and 'terrifying', which tells us that we did a good job in convincing our audience.

Overall, we have learnt that our genre of slasher/horror was not predominant enough, although we made sure that the mise-en-scene: make-up and costuming of the 'evil' character was the key of the trailer. It was the favourite and best element of the trailer according to our audience, however it could have been more gory to emphasise the slasher sub-genre.
The feedback we have received has helped us to make decisions during the process, the positive feedback has given us confidence for future projects, and the constructive criticism has helped us highlight which areas we would need to improve on.