What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our target audience was teenage male, we previewed our trailerin our class which has a mixture of female and male students. The feedback that we gained from the preview of our trailer, we were able to see things that we could improve and the elements that they thought were good.

The points that they thought were good were horror conventions, such as the night shots and the use of creepy movements, such as the bed scene where you are unable to see anything but the hands moving under the covers as it adds tension. Also, our use of make up on the monster and crawling out of the wardrobe where we changed the speed of it so it moved in a weird and akward way, this impressed our audience.

Other points that were mentioned were to do with the camerawork and editing, these included blink shots in between some of the visual shots to give the effect of someone blinking and POV shots of the monster looking at the victim. We also used alot of close ups which work well with added fear and making it scary as you are unable to see the whole picture.
A good motif that we liked and also the audience said they thought was good was the lighting the candle at the beginning and it being blown out at the end. It is also creates an eery atmostphere and movitvated lighting.

However the points that they thought could be improved really helped us see what more we could do to the visual and audio edit. The points that they picked up on were, to do mainly the audio. Saying that they didn't like some of the sound effects of the screaming as they were out of place and genreally didn't fit. We hope that we change some of them so that they fit better and sound more realistic. The other audio that they didn't particularly like was the actual soundtrack, they thought it wasn't fast enough when the edits and narrative increased.

Other editing problems which we had were the brightness of some of the shots, so we are planing on putting fliters over the top so that they look more like night time scenes as some people in the audience thought it looked like two different stories going on at the same time. This also ties in with the fact of the narrative, people didn't understand it clearly and caused a lot of confusion in who was the victim and the monster as we had different characters playing them.

One thing that had mixed views was our intertitles, some people liked them because the background was like earth moving and because the beginning of our trailer was set in a graveyard it work, whereas others thought the backgorund didn't fit as it was a distraction to the eye and looked to much like something on an action trailer.

I also showed our trailer to and older, male and female audience, just to see if they wanted to see the film after watching the trailer and to also get their views on it. Generally they thought it was good but like the the younger audience, found the intertitles too distracting but all in all mainly the male audience said they thought the story line looked interesting and that they wanted to see the film.

Overall, the comments we gained were benefically and would help us improve our trailer, which we are looking into doing. But I am pleased that it was generally liked and majority of people said they would like to watch the film to find out the full story line.