What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our target audience is mainly, male and female teenagers and young adults. Our film would probably attract the female audience due to the use of the strong female character we have in our trailer, because it’s not very often the killer is the murderer. Our film also would attract the male audience due to the use of the entire cast being female. Our target audience will also like different films of the same genre, like Sorority Row, and The Room-Mate etc.

This is a rough example of what we believe the female target audience would look like, just a casual teenager; who’s possibly a horror film fanatic, and a regular cinema goer but also has other interests, for example singing or acting or something along them lines.

This is another rough example of the male target audience, just average, like’s nights out with friends etc. But also enjoys horror films, and films of the similar genre to ours.

http://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/avatar/

We made a feedback form to ask a focus group,

their opinion of our trailer. We wanted to establish how the trailer came across to our target audience and we also wanted to make sure that our intended audience and our genre were clear.

This is a copy of our feedback form, which we shared with the focus group to fill out.

The questions that we wrote were asking the better frames from our trailer, how effective was the sound that was used, and how it conveys its main point, mood or theme… The questions were a good way to understand the audience’s views on our trailer.

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It was good to see that our intended audience and our genre were clear.
And their opinion of the main point mood and theme was what we were hoping for, and knowing how they think it was conveyed was good because it helped us realise that what we were doing was correct.

Knowing that this person believes we fulfil our genre well, is good because they mentioned how clean the editing was and the use of the blood splats during the trailer, because blood is usually the main convention of a horror film/trailer.

Asking the focus group their opinion is good for us, because it helps us understand what needs improving if anything. This person said that we needed to make our editing tighter, which was good knowing what we needed to improve on, because we’ll know for next time.

Due to the trailer being so short, and not being able to show the entire film, from the forms that our plot wasn’t too clear. The most popular answer used was “Killer dicing up girls” like the form shown here, but the killer was actually suffering from mental problems leaving her constantly paranoid.

This was our sheet we used when we were deciding which font to use for our main font for our title. We all had different opinions in our group and asking the opinion of a group worked well because they were the main audience we were targeted at so, it worked well using the font that they felt was more suitable.

Due to popular demand the font we used was the middle one called “face your fears” the bottom font would have been good if we were doing something similar to Paranormal Activity, but because our film is more of a horror/slasher, using “Face your fears” looks similar to blood to smears, so it insinuates to the audience what the film will be including.

This was a comment that was left on our YouTube channel about our final trailer, and although it doesn’t give improvements or anything like that, it was good to see that someone we don’t know had watched our video and left a positive comment. It was also good because it was clear to them that the genre elements were there.

We researched into existing horror films to gain a wider perspective of the conventions. This helped us to acknowledge what features appeal to our target audience, and encouraged us to try and intrigue them.

So overall from our audience feedback we have learnt how important it is to gain insight into what our target audience want from a horror film, so when making our trailer we had to include all the necessary horror features to entice the audience into further watching our film.