What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

In one specific class session we specificly viewed each other’s trailers in order to gain feedback from other members of the class. Through the use of the class feedback session I discovered lots of positive and negative aspects of our trailer. The feedback we acquired may be considered bias due to the demographic of our class being mainly teenage boys. Despite this the demographic of horror movies is prominently teenage boys the feedback should be appropriate.

Through this I have been able to accordingly change and modify the trailer in order to combat those negative parts. Having the audience feedback had a really noticeable effect on the trailer and has definitely made the trailer better as a result.

The first thing which became immediately obvious through the feedback was that people really liked our inter-titles,  they all thought that these were well made and suited the trailers colour scheme and general supernatural feel. However there was a minority which believed that while the effect was good and well made, it was too busy, and needed reducing so you can easily see what the text actually said. In responce to this we altered the titles so they had less effect on them.

Despite this they felt that we used the same inter-title style too much and that we should change the inter-titles which contained the names of the companies which produced the movie. We took this on board and spent a while designing custom titles for the specific companies.

The feedback we recieved was largely positive and this was something we were very pleased with. There were a few other small issues that people raised but these were easily editable without the ened to reshoot. The only major thing people seemed to have a problem with is the ongoing green filter placed over a large amount of the shots within the trailer. This is something we keenly debated within the group and decided that we should keep the effect, and sometimes taking a more original style and going against the horror conventions could work in our favour. By using the green filter we wanted to give the idea of a supernatural being stalking the protagonist, this effect also mimics the style of a nightvision camera which has been used in lots of horror movies such as Paranormal Activity. The classes critisisms came from the idea that the green filter was infact a convention of the sci-fi genre and was not appropriate, although we agreed with this, we felt that this did give us a sence of originality within our work and though this was actually beneficial.

A scene from Paranormal activity. With its noticable green filter.

Another thing which people seemed to enjoy was the gradual rise in tempo of our trailer. They enjoyed how it ended with faced pace POV scene and thought that this was a good way to end the trailer. They suggested in this scene that there should be whispering over the top of the shot, so it sounds like the antagonist is trying to scare the protagonist away. We thought this was a good idea and made an effort to implement them into the background.

We actually did two different sets of whispers and tested them both, eventually we did choose and found that they do add that bit extra that the final scene needed.