Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

Feedback for teaser trailer. (Kerry Treacy)

Once our promotional package was complete we as a group decided to distribute our products online and promotionally advertise them in a more of an advanced method. By the method of digitally advertsisng our teaser production and other promotional materials we followed the convention of professional media packages and how they are advertised, in addition to this we thought this was an important convention to use due to the fact that the target audience that we aimed for are popularly known for seeing film promotional material in this method (digital). This would make it more convenient for our audience to visually see our finished products. This was successfully achieved by using viral sources of advertising which we as a group broadcasted and published our products. Our main product of our teaser trailer was published on you tube.Once the teaser trailer was broadcasted on you tube we then needed another tactic of promoting that our product was finished and available to digitally view. This was achieved by the use of social networking sites. It was logical for us to use social networking sites as each individual member of our group used social networking sites on a daily regularly basis to communicate, interact and message friends on a network.This was an advantage to us due to the fact that we had constant and accessible ways of communication with a broad network of people.

Up above are two photographic images which visually show how we as a group digitally advertised our media products on social networking sites. By the action of advertising on face book and you tube we were enabled to get automatic feedback form our audience members. By our method of promoting in this way we were successfully achieving effective results for audience feedback. Due to the fact that we all individually promoted our products on social networking sites we were specifically targeting our target audience of the younger gender. Advertising on social networking sites and you tube was also beneficial to us due to the fact that it was a free promotional method and was convenient and assessable for audience members to view our media package.

The youtube statics automatically gave us instant feedback from audience members not only from individuals we knew but also people worldwide, this method enabled us to virally advertise our teaser production on a broad scale allowing audience members to view our teaser. From our post production research and knowledge of methods of advertsisng we knew that it was popular for a target audience of 15 - 25 to view and research film promtionally material on Youtube, therefore it was important for us to follow this technique as it would effectively target our audience.. YouTube also benefited us by enabling is to visually see the demographics and static’s of who was watching our teaser trailer.

Up above are two photographic images which visually show the demographics that we got from YouTube. The demographics were able to visually show and communicate to us what gender and age our teaser trailer product was being viewed by. The statistics show that a high popularity of 13-17 year old males were the most popular in viewing our broadcasted product. This in effect was a successful and a positive result of feedback that we gathered from statistics as we achieved our goal of creating a teaser trailer that would appeal and was produced specifically for a youth age audience.

Feedback from Facebook for poster. (Olympia Amoo)
We posted our poster on facebook in order to obtain a range of different types of feedback from people. Below are the results:

We had a lot of comment and above is just a few examples of these. ‘’WOW! I thought it was a real film. Good uno. But yh.... the ‘coming out’’ needs to stand out x’’; this was one of the comments left under our poster, this is the kind of feedback that has help us to think what we could have done better. Even though we received positive feedback we seemed to get the same criticism everywhere and that was that the ‘Coming Soon’ was not visible enough.

Strengths of all three products. Improvements They all follow at least 3 conventions of horror. Making ‘coming soon’ stand out. Good use of mise en scene. Change the thickness of the font of ‘Taken' Good photography. Good editing.

The comments left on the poster; as seen above were mostly positive, the poster is defiantly one of the stronger pieces out of our three products.

Feedback for the trailer from Facebook.

We received a lot of positive feedback for our trailer from Facebook. The aim of our trailer is to get people interested and make them want to watch the 'film'. From the comments we can see that the audience reacted well to the trailer. Most people made a comment about the last seconds of the trailer which is a quick cut of the 'killers' face with a loud scream over it. We got several comments from this; examples of the comments are:

I'am Nikki Singer: ''LOOOOOOL DAT FING AT THE END FACKIN SCARED ME...IT'S GOOD DOE''

Miriam Kamara: ''I forgot to mention that bit at the end scared the shit out of me...dat bit was sick''

The above comments show that our aim worked, we wanted people to feel relaxed as the trailer went on and then at the end get a big shock. The reason we did this was so that our audience would remember our trailer more than any other trailer that they have seen before or are going to see in the future. From the audience feedback we have learned that less is more; we didn't include to many action shots because we didn't want to reveal all the action we just wanted to tease them.

Some positive criticisms that we got was that the shots were good but the sound wasn't as good. ''I think the music while the victim is getting dragged around is a bit over dramatic'' < This was one of the comments left under the video; i think that we should have blended in the dramatic music more subtly with the lullaby music.

Positive Feedback

''Text at the beginning is good as it give the audience some context as to what has gone on in her life.''
''Good blur to sharp focus of the doll at the start.''
''Mise en scene is perfect ''sets a chilling atmosphere''.
''Nice fade in shots''
''Good reference to girls age ''17 years old''
''Flicking light effect is good''

Criticism
''Shot at the beginning are a bit too quick.''

''Could be less synthesized''

''Could redo the voice over (a bit more base in the voice)''

''Less dramatic music in the middle''

Audience reaction to our Trailer.

The audiences reaction is just how we wanted it to be. They jumped at the right part that we intended them to.

Audience Research through the internet. (Rasheda Miah)

From the feedback we had received from the Facebook comments on our trailer, poster and magazine we have seen the effectiveness of the impact of thoughts from the audiences we had. The comments we received were positive with good remarks been made. The trailer had been embedded on Facebook to gain interests from friends within Facebook, Facebook has a large number of activities therefore looking at the tally of the YouTube forecast of the video it shows Facebook has brought in the audiences and clearly attracted people to view the trailer.

The positive feedbacks we received were based on the editing of the trailer such as the fading in of the shots, the blur of the doll but transformation to sharp focus, now based on the feedback we have got a broad idea of how we all done well with the editing, we feel if the audiences can pick up the editing which was there to enhance the viewers feel has been noticed by the audience then it has worked well in the trailer as it has had a effective conclusion. The audiences felt a sudden shock in some of the parts of the trailer when we expected them to jump because of the scene, this connoted that the trailer had stuck to its conventional genre of it being a horror/thriller movie.

The poster had also been uploaded onto Facebook and that gained more hits as people wanted to view it as we had seen from feedbacks such as from a Facebook friend giving a comment saying ‘’WOW! I thought it was a real film. Good uno…”. Judging by that comment we assume other people on Facebook must have had thought the same in their minds, they must have thought it is a real movie which is being promoted. The poster has been effective as it contained images of the victim with blood around the mouth area, it is gruelling to see, however a person would still decide to view the image enlarged to see what exactly the image is on Facebook. On clicking the image they would see it is a movie poster and hopefully comment on what their opinions are on the poster.

However, we all in the group feel if we had another chance to redo the project again we could take out, the negative remarks/criticism by making some changes in how we designed the poster, magazine front page and the editing of the trailer.

The criticism overall we found out to be more or less the same. We have criticism about the music whilst the victim is being dragged out was too dramatic, also some people have also said that there wasn’t enough actions being made for instance less shots in other words. The trailer could have shown bit more in depth of the story instead of cutting to the main point where the victim is being dragged out. There could have possibly been a scene before the victim is attacked and how she spends her normal life before the outrage.

The voice over in the trailer towards the end “…coming to a cinema near you” could have been improved. The voice could have been replaced with a male’s voice as it would create a greater suspense due to it having a deeper tone of voice. A prop which we could consider is a ‘Voice Morpher’. The Voice Morpher electronically enhances the voice to a range of voices and will drastically change the current voice. We could have also wisely considered and chosen what and where to use diegetic and non-diegetic sounds in our trailer in order to create a dramatic effect at the right time to entice the audiences’ throughout the teaser trailer.

During the production of the trailer we had issues relating to the costume. The costume unfortunately had been missing at one stage which resulted in using alternative solutions. Our initial plan was to have the villain in the poster but this could not go according to plan as the costume was missing, therefore we could not achieve what we expected and intended to. Due to the same reason we were also unable to include more action scenes including the villain. Nevertheless we still had the victims costume remaining and were able to have the victim in the poster and it compensated for the villains costume.

To elaborate more on why we were unable to continue on filming the trailer and include more shots was due to the miss appearance of the costume. This costume had affected out continuity of good use of Mise en Scene and without it we as a group had missed the opportunity to excel on to create more scenes.

Moving onto the poster for the movie ‘TAKEN’, it had good feedbacks in terms of the contents and how it had the effect on the audience on first glance at it, however the poster had all the required information but on one case the ‘Coming Soon’ text below the Title had been said to be too small and not been suitable for viewing due to its sizing. The size of the text would be enlarged to a suitable size and be made bold and be more visually readable.

Overall if we had more time we could have taken the chance to practise more on the trailer and done a draft run of the trailer. What this would mean is rehearsing the trailer and filming couple of the same scenes and collating them and see which trailer looks the best. This is very time consuming but it would point out what needs to be improved. We would also include the audiences’ feedbacks and thoughts as it is very valuable and their comments will enable us to understand more, on what we possibly may have missed and what we could include to make our products even better. Overall we have had to stick to our provided time scale and make a teaser trailer, magazine front page and film poster, which we have and are proud of.