What have you learnt from audience feedback?

I think completing focus groups helped us massively in making our trailer what it is. All of the comments were taken on board, positive and negative, the negatives we then did our best to amend to make our trailer as good as possible. I feel that these focus groups have highlighted problems that we may never have come across which has led to our trailer improving drastically.

Section A:PositivesIn our focus group screening the main positives were the gore effects that we had created as seen with the dead blonde victims at around 1 minute 13 seconds into the trailer; and the inter-titles tied in really well with the narrative due to the slashed font chosen. Due to their popularity among our focus group we believed that these areas needed no direct improvements. 

However, in some parts we did make some final improvements with final shot effects, audio levels and speed/duration, these were very minor tweaks that improved the overall pacing of the trailer due the increased effectiveness of the collision cutting. A good example of collision cutting is Evil Dead (2013) https://youtu.be/FKFDkpHCQz4

Section A:PositivesIn our evaluation screening our main positives was the clarity of the narrative, the gore effects and the added effect coming from the composed music. As you can see, these are different from the first focus group screening; this is due to improvements we made from the criticism given.

 

A big bonus to our trailer from the original focus group screening to the evaluation screening is that the evaluation screening we had added music. We composed the music to fit the trailer adding to the power of the montage, and this proved to be a massive help in the overall performance of our trailer and this was proven by the positive feedback we received for it.

Section B:NegativesPersonally, I think that hearing the negatives of your trailer is a lot more important than the positives. It is always nice to hear that you work is being positively thought of but you can’t improve with positives and we wanted to make our trailer the best it could possibly be. Some of the criticisms we received hadn’t even crossed our minds so hearing alternative point of views really benefited the quality of the trailer because it allowed us to see through the audience’s eyes.

In our focus group screening the main negatives were that the trailer didn’t have any music, it wasn’t very fast paced and the inter-titles weretoo long. The music was a main factor that we needed to address but we were working on this and it was just simply not ready so this was a problem that was already being addressed. The pacing was a problem because without music it made it very apparent that some shots were slightly incorrect in order to making the collisioncutting more effective. One of the reasons this wasn’t as good as it could be was that the inter-titles were too long and we were missing some shots that we hadn’t put in yet. So we simply played around with the speed/duration of theinter-titles and added in the shots to add to the pacing, for instance the car wheel shot. This is a shot we had added in but due to the panic and speed of the shot, this really added to the overall pacing of the trailer.

Section B:NegativesIn the evaluation screening the amount of negatives was massively reduced with lots of the points on having one vote each, which could be proved to be more of a personal opinion rather than something being dramatically wrong.

However, there were some points that received three or four votes between them so it is obviously that these are things that we need to address, the points were that the scream shot was used twice, jump scare at the end was too quick and the jump scare needs to be louder. The jump scare was a new shot that had been recently added so it was new to us how people reacted to it, it was an effective shot it just needed some work. We went back into Adobe Premiere Pro and played around with it, we looked at the speed and duration as well as the levels of the audio, trying to address the criticism we received. For the scream we did not have enough time to re-shoot another shot and this contributed massively to the pacing so we decided to leave this shot as it was before. We aware that if we had more time that we would have re-shot this but in the time scale we had it would be too steep of a task.

The evaluation screening was a great chance for any final tweaks to be highlighted and for us to address these but the dramatically reduced amount of criticisms reassured us that we had made a good trailer and the scores we received reflected this. For the focus group screening we achieved an average score of around 6, something that we certainly weren’t that happy about. However, we knew we had a lot to add to the trailer so the score was something that we expected but in the evaluation screening we received an average score of 7.5, which we are very happy with. All of the work of the criticisms proved to make a massive difference shown by the two scores and this can be made even better with the final tweaks that we have made. Overall, we are very happy with the progress the trailer has made and this is largely down to the importance of the focus group and evaluation screenings because they highlighted criticisms that we needed to address. To see the comments our focus group made, the evaluation screening can be seen when following this link https://youtu.be/X89XgKYANRQ .