What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

When producing an ad campaign for a movie, be it horror or otherwise, it is important that you make your product seem very appealing to the target audience, or better, the large percentage of movie goers. There are several ways to go about this for an ad campaign. One way is to have an ad campaign that is aesthetically appealing to people, which will intrigue them into seeing it. Another way to sell the film is to tag it to an important figure in the film industry, as this will have appeal to the people who are fans of them. This can usually be seen with the producer or director of films, like Peter Jackson or Quentin Tarantino, who both help to give films that have their name on them appeal to fans of their previous films. However, these methods are all futile if the audience is not moved, touched, or otherwise feels the desire to see the film, and as only the target audience truly knows what they want from an advertising campaign, they are a very useful resource for film producers who want to really get the public's attention. This is what I have learned from the audience research that my team received in the audience feedback session in lesson time.

How we gathered audience research for our first horror movie trailer was through showing the rest of the class our trailer on a large screen twice. The first viewing was so that people could get the basic gist of how our trailer played itself out and what the basic plot was. The second viewing was for note making about what was conventional about the trailer, which elements were particularly effective, which elements we liked most of all, and any flaws about the trailer. We were then handed the sheets back at the end of the note making and asked to verify why we said particular things about other the groups work. The cycle then started afresh with another group.

For our work, the vast majority of our team believed that it was a shambles, as it had an bizarre plotline that didn't connect together well at all, dodgy sound effects and sub-par editing. As a result, we were confident that the rest of the group would feel the same way about the first draft. However, while most of the feedback was indeed negative, there were some positive thoughts about certain elements, but I shall get onto those later. Firstly, the constructive criticism. One of the main complaints was that there was very little understanding of what the plot was about, as there was little explaining done in the shots and the texts slots didn't add any depth to it. As a result, people were confused about what was going, asking why there was a doodler, and why did he turn evil, and such like. This helped us to realise that the plot didn't have even to any depth to it at all. Another common fault was that the editing was incredibly sporadic and didn't help to add to the feeling at all. In fact, if anything it detracted from the experience, as it didn't link together any shots very well, and the aftermarket sound effects that we used were cheap, stock and sometimes completely out of place, the key example being a running noise with, bizarrely, a dinosaur or likewise monster in the background. However, as I mentioned previous, there were some positive reactions. One of which was the fact that there were some good shots in the trailer, like the random shot of a bird flying in the sky, which was said to be particulary effective. Another feature that was said to be effective was the variation of shots that were included, however it could also be seen as a hinderance as there was, as i've mentioned, no plot in the trailer.

We found that the feedback was on the whole, what we expected to hear about the trailer. We didn't expect any people to actually like any parts of the trailer though, so that came as a shock to us. However, despite some positive feedback and some areas where we could have improved our base trailer, we believed that it would still be pathetic when compared to the higher quality of some of the other  groups products. Therefore, we decided to cut our losses to that trailer and start fresh with a new, simplified and improved idea. This product has proven to be a much higher quality product than the first one, most likely because we took the critisism to heart and avoided making the same mistakes twice.