Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For the audience feedback we conducted both a questionnaire on the blog to find out about people's initial reaction on the first set of ideas we laid out, then afterwards we asked people through word of mouth on their thoughts on the final finished pieces of work. We decided that most of the questions should be open so that any feedback we received was mainly formed from opinions and any improvements or changes that could be potentially made. Although the questions were made so that the audience had a choice, but had a wider range to choose from than a simple 'one or the other' answer. Although in some cases this couldn't be avoided, such as gender. However on as many questions as possible we tried to include as many different options as possible in order to get the most honest vote from our audience. From the feedback we received, the majority of voters were female closely followed by males. We found the age bracket was from mid-late teens into the early twenties, therefore the responding public matched our target audience perfectly, as I would issue the 'Intervention' film as a 15 rating. The females would be able to relate to the female protagonist in the story-line, and the males would potentially admire them.

One big problem that had to be overcome in the trailer was that we needed to get the correct location that would appeal to the audience the most and what they expect to see when watching a horror movie. So we set out a question that ultimately set out to find the audience's preferred horror locations and then used those settings to film in. As there was a tie between results, we decided to add a few in, in the hope and prospect of attracting a larger target audience. From results that came in, I learned that a large majority of the target audience expect horror films to be located in an area that is slightly built up at some point during the movie. The sense of being in an open and exposed area with no help available is a convention that some horror movies use. However being in a built up area with plenty of possible help but not being able to get any is also used, which I believe is scarier. Which has led me to believe that this is why people have chosen urban areas for a location as the protagonist is surrounded by potential help, yet they aren't able to contact anyone for it. This theme reinforces the theme of being alone with no one else to aid you. We also learned that the clothing and traits of the antagonist, as well as the way the footage represents each character, was highly appealing to the audience. Lots of comments came back about how scary the killer was and how it would scare them into wanting to see it at the cinema. I believe this is down to listening to the original views of the audience that were returned from the questionnaire. By listening to what people would like to see in a horror movie and by adding their ideas together in the process of creating this piece of coursework, is why I feel we returned such positive comments. The overall point learned from the audience feedback is that if you listen to what your target market want, then substitute that into your own ideas and storylines, then you will be able to create a much better media output at the end of the process. By including more features and themes that the audience like, the more likely it is that they will enjoy the finalized piece even more.