Question 3

Evaluation question 3:
What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback has been an important part of making the trailer for my group. We especially wanted to garner feedback from young people, as our film is aimed at the 16-24 age bracket.

In order to best connect with our target audience, we looks at the mediums in which they communicate most frequently, and found that social networking sites were the best way to get people to give us feedback. To this end, we set up a Facebook page and posted discussion topics on the wall of it, and then asked our friends who fit into our target demographic to answer our questions and give feedback on our ideas.

We have used the Facebook page as a feedback tool throughout the project. The first time we used it was before we had even begun pre-production- we wanted to ask our target age group what kind of films they would want to see, so we posted two ideas we had for films and asked them which they would prefer. The most popular answer was the idea we went on to use.


As the project went on, we started using the platform to garner feedback for other aspects of the task- for example, we posted this question about the ancillary tasks.

As well as the Facebook page, we made up a questionnaire and gave it to thirty people between the ages of sixteen and twenty, with the basic idea of finding out the answers to these questions:

- What gender our project would most appeal to, and how we could make it better appeal to both
- What genres are most popular, eg. comedy, romance, and how can we include them in our project?
- What would make people want to see our film?

Based on these results, our detailed analysis of which can be found here(http://nicholathorpea2media.blogspot.com/2010/10/questionnaire-and-analysis.html) we shaped elements of what our project was going to be; for example, we found that comedic elements were universally popular, and romance was very popular with girls, so we included a scene in our trailer with a kiss (to pander to the romantics) followed by a slap (for comedic effect.)

We also used the fellow pupils in our Media class as a source for feedback, because the ages of our class range from 17-19, therefore everyone in it is in our target demographic. They gave us some more specific, technical pointers upon the showing of our rough cut (below).




The improvements they suggested were:

- Including more of the footage we shot, as they felt the rough cut got a bit repetetive and the extended shots of the characters walking down the alleyway were unnecessary.

- Instead of including the tagline, 'Money don't grow on trees,' they suggested that we should have prompt cards that told the viewer a little more about the plot, as they struggled to tell what the film was about.

- They liked the use of the song 'A Message to you, Rudy', but when we informed them of our intention to mix it with a grittier rap song, they were enthusiastic and felt it may help the audience grasp the nature of the film better.

We took this information on board and edited our rough cut, eventually coming up with the final trailer below. We adhered to all of the changes suggested by our 'test screening' group, and then we showed it to them again.



Our Media group said they were pleased to see the changes they suggested had been made, and stated that the best change was the dropping of the tagline and the inclusion of narrative slides, particularly as our trailer does not use dialogue. They felt that the inclusion of basic narrative made the footage a lot easier to understand and had a better idea of the plot.

We felt all the way through that it was of pivotal importance that we listened to what our audience was saying, as if we simply made a film that we were interested in, we may attract a limited amount of people. Obviously we wanted our film to be universally likeable, and so we took into consideration every criticism that our audience presented us with.