During the viewing of the first draft, the audience were not sure on the red titles, as they were not able to read what it was saying. We learnt that even if the titles do not look that interesting, it is fine as long as people can read them, so we eventually went for white font on a black background. At first, some of the audience were confused, but after we added voiceover bridges, they understood what was going on. If the audience understand the main plot, they are more likely to want to go and see the whole film.
The critics liked the music, as they felt at each point of the trailer, the music conveyed the emotions of the characters.
At the beginning of the trailer, Mindy dials 999 to speak to the police about her killings. At this point it is not clear why she is dialling this number but it conveys a sense of mystery, which in the audience, that she clearly gave to the other characters. However, at first the phone call was long and quite revealing i.e. Mindy claims 'I just killed my friend', we cut it down to only a few sentences. This went down well with the audience because it enhanced the mystery even more.
The audience liked the final shot because the music and shot combined scared them and made them jump and it left them feeling nervous, but wanting to see the rest of the film.
A few people criticised that they weren't sure who all the people were. However, a trailer is not supposed to give everything away and so they realised that in the actual film, the characters personalities would be built up.
Aisha and I made an informed decision regarding our choice of research methods, in order to gain our audience feedback. Firstly, we made a visual documentary on people's views on horror films. We also researched in the form of questionnaires.
These methods work to our advantage, as the methods we had concluded to use were easily accessible. Consequently we could also use the information gained such as the audio recording feedback from Garageband, and incorporate it into our rough cut, therefore creating an audio commentary feedback. This would be a more communicative method of analysis than just writing the information into our blogs. Another advantage to our choice of research methods is that we could also receive immediate feedback, which in turn would make the process of improving our trailer much quicker and convenient.
The choice of our target age range enabled us to easy access of our target audience as we had our peer groups and friends, as well as teachers and relatives, to provide views of our rough cut and make relevant critical comments to our trailer.
Nevertheless, there are some factors that might hinder the validity of our research gained. For example, interviewer desirability bias may occur when we carry out interviews or offer questionnaires to our target audience, as they may feel pressured to give the “correct” answer that we might want to hear, instead of giving constructive criticisms. This could be evident in group interviews, as a person might be prone to giving the same response as the other interviewees.
Another problem is time keeping, as our target audience might of felt rushed for time while completing our analysis. However, we had resolved this problem by briefing them of what our research is about and telling them that they could take their time answering the questions.
Our questionnaire
Below is a link to my Aisha's blog of a film of our audience, who took part in filling in the questionnaire.
Aisha Salim Media A2:
