What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our trailer was played in front of the whole class (consisting of students aged 17-19). This age group was helpful as they were the target audience for our horror trailer. This meant that the feedback we were given was even more useful when making last minute changes to our trailer in order to improve it. We got both positive and negative feedback. The feedback we received was compared to actual horror trailers, and how much we followed the typical codes and conventions of a horror trailer. Screening our trailer in class allowed us to not only receive written feedback, but also visual feedback as we were able to experience the class’ reaction to our trailer.

In an actual horror movie production, feedback is very important for the distribution of the film, as it helps the producers to decide what to keep and what to cut out of the trailer, as well as any improvements that could be made.

We had feedback on many different aspects of our trailer, one of which was sound. People tended to like the opening music to our trailer, but were puzzled as to why there was baby’s laughter later on. Due to the amount of responses that disliked the baby’s laughter, as a group we decided to take it out of our trailer. In general, the responses we received show that the majority of people enjoyed the build-up of sound to a crescendo in the final few seconds of our trailer. I believe that the ticking clock sound worked well, which was shown by the positive feedback we received from it. It followed a typical conventional sound in a horror trailer of a ticking, almost heartbeat-like sound.

A point in the trailer which everyone seemed to enjoy was the final shot of someone hanging, and the build-up of music that went with it. I think people tended to like that part because it was unexpected, and everyone had thought that the trailer was over. By adding this to the end of our trailer, we have followed another typical convention of a horror film by giving our trailer a shock and surprise ending to try and make our audience jump. This would eventually hopefully help them to remember our trailer and so want to see the cinema release of it.

The feedback we received in terms of editing had both good points and bad points. In general, people liked the lengths of our individual clips, except for the montage, which was seen as being too long and having too many similar clips in it. We couldn’t change this a great deal as there was not enough time to go and shoot some more footage. However, we spliced some other clips into our montage, making it more fast-paced, another typical convention of a horror trailer. This will help to raise the adrenaline of our audience when watching the trailer.

The feedback we received was very helpful, due to the number of improvements that we made to our trailer due to it. This has hopefully allowed us to achieve a higher grade for our project. As a group, we carefully looked at the criticisms of our trailer and made changes accordingly. We found that some of the sound didn’t work, and our montage didn’t fit the codes and conventions of a montage in a typical horror trailer.

In conclusion, our feedback from the class allowed us to create, what we think is, and much better and higher quality horror trailer.