Evaluation question 3 - What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Pre - production audience research:

Pre-production Audience Research from KimberleyEspinosa1

For question 3, I and my group decided that the best suitable way to gain a true picture of audience opinions was to conduct focus groups and interviews for feedback. The focus groups and  interviews consisted of both females and males, this was because our trailer was not aimed at a specific gender, furthermore, the age range of the interviews were between 17-19, they were conducted with this age range as our trailer was aimed at the youth or young adults as youth tend to be up to date with new films and hybrid genres, so we believed that this target age was suitable for our trailer.

Due to the variety of questions asked, the first thing I realised is that our genre was easily understood and identified by the majority of the feedback we got, however, we also realised that to possibly make the trailer identify as a psychological thriller to be specific, that a few more effects such as low-key lighting could have made a slight difference.

One of the aims of our trailer was to create tension by building suspense, this was done by cross-cutting, as well as fast pace editing along with suitable music, from the interviews conducted, I found that this aim was reached as the audience found it scary due to a few jumps scares and suspense building up, furthermore this demonstrates how the trailers editing allowed the trailer to be appealing to the target audience and the genre to be understood.
Furthermore, we also found that the audience had a good understanding the narrative, as they described it as "students trying to escape""the protagonist being possessed", etc. This showed us how the narrative was quite clear and easy to understand, I believe that one of the reasons it was easily understandable is because of the intertitles used "who will escape first", which allowed the audience to gain a better idea of the narrative.
Additionally, From conducting focus groups, it allowed us to see audiences first-hand reactions and facial expressions which gave us an idea of what they thought, after analysing this I realised that our trailer was effective and appealing to the target audience.

In conclusion, through conducting focus groups and interviews it demonstrated how effective our editing was due to the suspense built and positive feedback, however, I also realised that there could have been improvements with some of the mise-en-scene could have been improved such as lighting to compliment the genre further.