Evaluation: Question 3 : What have you Learnt From Audience Feedback?

The effectiveness of our products is evident in our audience feedback. I have asked a few people, both media and non-media students whether they liked the print products, I have done a questionnaire asking questions such as “Is there anything we can do to improve the Poster?” and do you think the poster fits in with the horror genre?” The general feedback turned out to be positive, especially the poster. 
We also did audience feedback at the beginning of our project to ask people what they thought of the plot and also we asked which genre of film people enjoyed. The result of this questionnaire was that the genre horror was the most popular. This is why we decided to create a trailer of a horror film as well as the ancillary products. We thought that this would be a good idea as we could be quite creative with horror genre both in the trailer and the print products. 

When we had reached the point that we thought our trailer was nearly complete we carried out a questionnaire to see what an actual audience thought of it rather than ourselves as we had been looking it for a while and thought it would be good to get a new perspective of it. One of the questions we asked was :

Does the music match the pace of the trailer?

some argued that towards the end of the trailer the music wasn't fast enough and if it was louder and faster it would seem more like a horror and would be more frightening. Others agreed that the pace matched the music well and that it shouldn't be changed, as the majority thought that the music should be faster and louder we did play around with the music a bit more and found a better music piece that would fit the genre as well as maintain the right speed for our trailer to create suspense. But we didn't ask anyone if they liked the new music and pace which we should have done. 


We also asked whether people thought the trailer was effective and if it would provoke them to watch the whole film?


The answers were mixed 6 out of 10 people replied that they would watch the whole film as they found it intriguing and they understood what was happening in the trailer. But the other 4 people said they would not watch the film all the way through partially because they didn't prefer this genre and they did think that having a child as the bad person was a bit weird and creepy. From this Manny and me learn that overall more people would watch the film but we could have improved this statistic by maybe altering our plot slightly so that the child wouldn't look so evil and we could made the character appear a bit more sensitive in the beginning so that the audience would know why he turned evil. We knew that we could have included more footage to portray this. 


In addition to this we asked if the editing and camerawork was good?
Many said that in some areas the camera showed a lot of red, and this ruined some of the effect of the shot but others disagreed with this statement and said that the red added to the sense of horror and fitted well with the genre. Because of this we tried to reduce the amount of red shots but quite a lot of our footage was red so it was suggested that all of our shots should look a bit red towards the end this would make the trailer and shots look more consistent. The audience especially liked the editing of the titles and made it look like a real trailer. Also we were told that some of our shots were too long and were not similar to any other trailer and made the trailer run more like a story rather than having various bits from the film that still told the story effectively, there fore we had to shoot more footage and had to improve the narrative and reduce the timing of some of the shots which would also improve the pace of the trailer. 


We used other media platforms to gain audience feedback such as facebook and the Blog, the blog would allow anyone in our media class to comment on the ideas and work we have done and anyone can suggest improvements. 

 

Evaluation: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In the research part of the project we used our own blogs and the internet to search for and present our ideas that we could use in our trailer. I think we have developed since last year with the use our blogs because we are used to using them now and it is a way for other people to view and comment on our ideas expressing if they think they are good ideas or bad ones. It is also a record of what we have done, we can look back on some of our research to see how it links in to our trailer that we have made, so that we can compare and contrast our horror trailer to some other ones that we have researched. We needed to add in some more footage towards the end the production of our trailer, and by looking back over our research and other media products we could see how to improve our product.

During the construction of our trailer we used mainly camera and tripod. And during the editing we used adobe premiere pro and for the print products we used adobe Photoshop to edit photos and to produce the layout of each of them. I also used the internet to find out how to edit the photo on the poster. We developed our skills in using these programmes, as last year we used the adobe premiere pro, but this year we have added more effects, like to the titles where they now fade in, also some of the transitions of the shots. I think there is more of a variety of shots this time as opposed to last time because we planned the shots better. Also less of the shots are shaky because a tripod was used more often. We edited the footage in premiere pro, problems that we found with this software were that it crashed quite often, and this is one of the reasons why it took a long time for us to edit our footage, it was then found out that we had to convert the footage that was shot so that it was compatible with the programme.

I didn’t really know how to use Photoshop before this year, I learnt some new skills over the course of doing the project, and have produced a magazine cover and a film poster. We produced first drafts of both the poster and the magazine to start with, which were then both adapted, which then produced the final products. I basically tried to copy the format of other posters but have images and text which represented the film that we were advertising and promoting. I also learnt how to do some effects by looking at tutorials online which were useful.