Evaluation Question 3.

3.) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We created a questionnaire using SurveyMonkey to ask one hundred people about our teaser trailer to gage opinion on certain aspects of what the audience expects.

Our Media Survey.

The first question we asked was to find out what gender the audience would prefer the news reporter to be. This was so we could decide whether to follow the conventions of what the audience suggested or subvert them. In the time when this clip would be set there were more male news reporters than female as depicted in the post, so we were inclined to have a male reporter. However out of the 100 surveyed 66 said they would prefer a female news reporter subverting the conventions of the time. Therefore we went with those surveyed and used a female actress to be our news reporter.

Our female newsreporter.

The type of genre our teaser trailer would be means that if we followed convention, either the whole film would be shot in hand held or a mixture of hand held and tri-pod shots. As this type of style of film is relatively modern , inspired by The Blair Witch Project (1999), we asked those surveyed whether they would want the trailer to be shot in hand held.

Question number 2.

The answer was split almost evenly so we decided to film the majority of our teaser trailer in hand held  to give the point of view of the actors, similar to the clip shown below from Blair Witch, and then to break it up we had tripod shots to create a sense of stillness.

 

A major issue we discovered when planning our teaser trailer was how much of the villains/monsters to show. The other teaser trailers or theatrical trailers we used for research seemed to vary in whether they had villains in masks and also whether the audience saw the villain straight away, never or just fleetingly at the end. As a group we were undecided how to proceed on this issue so created a question on our survey to see what the audience would prefer. To keep the villain hidden until the end would create enigma and suspense throughout the teaser trailer but to show it at the beginning may lead to an anti-climax. We first asked whether they would want to see the villains face or for them to be hidden for example by wearing a mask.
The majority of those surveyed said they would not want to see the villains face. Therefore based on this result we decided to only show the villain briefly on two separate occasion creating suspense and enigma for the audience, securing this idea further we went to ask whether the audience would prefer our teaser trailer to focus on the victims, villains or a mixture of both.


The two scenes where our villians are shown

This was split 50/50 between focus on the victims and fair amount of both. Whilst taking into consideration these results we decided to focus on the victims leading on to their terror as they realise they aren’t alone. This ensured the audience could sense the disequilibrium but didn’t know what they were afraid of necessarily till the final few seconds.

Question number 3.

Another question we asked to those surveyed was whether they would expect to see a majority of male or female victims. Convention dictates normally victims are young females and as a group we were unsure whether we wanted to subvert or conform to this convention. We therefore also asked how old the audience expected our victims to be. The majority of those asked said they would expect our victims to be aged between 17-20 years old this conforms to conventions already set. We subsequently decided to choose actors from this age bracket as actors were easier to find but also it follows a natural convention set by horror films.

Our young actors aged between 17 and 18.

Linking on from this we decided based on result to our survey to have a majority of female victims; we had three female victims and one male victim. This was due to the fact the plot of our teaser trailer involved a group of young teenagers going in to an abandoned factory.