EVALUATION – TASMIN BAILEY- DELUSIONS

Question three-

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

During the development of our trailer we tried our best to keep our potential audience in mind. We needed to gather a clear idea of what an audience of a horror film is and what they expect and not expect to see on screen. We did this in many ways such as: the making of a facbeook page. When uncertain on what features to add to our trailer or ancillary texts we constructed a short list of the best choices then sent them around people to choose, we constructed a tally from these results and the idea with the most votes would be chosen to include in our project. Constructive feedback was also needed so asking for peoples opinion helped decide on important aspects of our project.

Audience feedback was crucial to gathering information on what our potential audience would like to see, when the draft of our trailer, poster and magazine covers had been produced we showed them to people who were interested in film and experienced with viewing such media products, this gave us a clear idea of the conventions of our product and enabled us to fine tune our product to fit the conventions and also challenge them.

we had a lot of difficulty choosing a title for our film and discussing it among ourselves as a team was leading to no direct conclusion, therefore we drew up a short list of names and sent them around the class and on facebook to the people who fitted the profile of our audience and asked them to choose a title, joint best were wymerring manor and delusions, we felt the delusions was more appropriate so we chose that as our title, choosing a title without this process would have taken much longer and we may not have been able to cater to our audiences needs.

We got the best feedback during this project for our poster and magazine covers, I think this is because the visual elements of these are easier to decipher because these products are stationary where as in the trailer information is moving at a fast pace and the audience find it harder to process the visual information and form a conclusion in their mind. For example we originally decided to use a mid shot of our character on the front of our magazine cover in order to follow magazine conventions however; we also had an effective close up of our characters face. To make our mind up what to use, both images were printed off and sent around our media class where it was confirmed that using the close-up was preferred.

The hardest way of getting audience feedback was facebook, because people did not want to “like” a facebook that had not been advertised by mass media before hand, other film companies (real ones) and movies (real ones) had a large following on facebook because of international renown and mass advertising, we had none of this so getting people to like our page was almost impossible. However with the ease of access of facebook we steal valued it as a valuable tool, and if this were a trailer for a real film or we were a real film company there would be no doubt the we would use facebook largely in advertising and getting information to our audience.

When asking for audience feedback we received varied answers; the answers we received from people uninterested in film were almost completely useless in critique, film lovers feedback was useful but many of them did not know the reasons why they liked certain parts of disliked others, the most helpful comments came from fellow media studies students or film studies students because they had knowledge in the construction of film trailers and understood the conventions, therefore their comments were most useful in developing our project further.