What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

In an ad campaign, it is important to receive feedback from your cohort to ensure that you advertise your product to its greatest potential. The feedback would come from the people who are closest to you so they will be able to tell you straight out what to do to make it better. They will also be colleagues studying a similar subject/art, so they will also be able to give you advice that will be able to help you more than others, as they know what they are doing. In this case, it was our media class of about 16 others. We screened our first draft in one of our media lessons, allowing the others to take notes on a pre-written questionnaire. We also allowed friends and family to view the trailer seeing the work we do, as they could also tell us what looks right and what doesn't. This helped us because we could see what an audience thought of our trailer that don't necessarily know about the conventions of a teaser trailer as much as media or film students.

At the end of the screening, we took in our feedback sheets and had a look at them. Just from the screening and watching the people's reactions, we could see that we were doing something right as a few of the girls were jumping at some of the parts of the trailer. For example, at the end of our draft trailer, we had a shot where Diederich jumps towards the camera right at the very end. This made them jump out of their skins. Another part that made them jump was where Diederich was revealed from behind the letters pinned on the door. We were all pleased by the reaction, as our trailer was the only trailer that made people jump like that.

However, some of the comments we recieved contradicted the reactions. One person said about how the shot of Diederich running at the camera looked a bit too humerous. This could be because the person playing the character wasn't intimidating enough, or was a bit small. If George had of played him then it would have looked a little better because he is bigger than Adam, and would therefore, look more intimidating. Rather than reshooting with a different Diederich, we thought we would have a go at making the shot look better in the editing room. We did this by adding in flask blackouts where the music "Booms" on the soundtrack where he charges towards the audience. This is a quite an unnerving scene, and with the right effects, it could be very effective. The blink shots show are nervousness in the eyes of the camera, saying what a daunting figure this Diederich is. It also shows how mysterious he is too. The fact the trailer doesn't reveal anything about his past also backs the enigma up.

Another critiscism we had was where I say "Oh my god" when the letters fall through the door. I really don't know why, but i couldn't stop saying it throughout the trailer shoot. People found this again, to be quite humerous, and as a drama student myself, it wasn't good enough, it was a bit too theatrical for a film. On this note, we decided that once again, it was a bit too late to reshoot, so Adam played about with the levels of my voice for the quote almost muting the "OH". This way it sounds a bit more realistic, less theatrical, and definitely less humerous.

People had also said a lot about the sound in our piece. We created it on Garageband on the IMac, and it basically featured a low C note drone with some chorussy effects, and then the occassional higher octave note added in. It was pretty basic, but it seemed to work. We also made a drum sound by adding some concert hall chorus effect to the bass drum, snare and floor tom to make an echoey drum effect. This also seemed to work well in parts where we intended to make people jump or unnerve them.

Some of our media class also commented on the lack of sound in our caption screens ("New house" and "New fear" etc.). We were thinking hard for a while on what to fill these gaps with before the screening, but in the end couldn't come up with anything. However, once we had recieved our feedback sheets, people had put ideas into our heads about some war time based snare drum/marching band beats that might work. We eventually filled these gaps with a loop we found on a Cd of a basic wartime marching band sound.

In the marketring campaign for our film, we also had to come up with a Film poster and a Magazine front cover. For my magazine cover, i chose to use Total Film (A horror special), rather than Empire. I have never read an Empire magazine, only Total Film, so i thought following roots would be the best plan. To begin with i messed around with original image on a Total Film logo, and wasn't really getting anywhere. My teacher suggested two specific images to focus on, which i did, and came up with these:

At first, the image on the right was my preferred choice, as it brakes all of the conventions of a standard Total Film cover, and I love the way the head pokes out of the curtains. However, my feedback revealed that there is not enough of the antagonist on show, and there is too much of the curtains that show normality. The image on the left also needed some developing. The title was quite large and in danger of covering up some of the image, so it was all about finding the right position for that. I also had some feedback saying how there is now less curtain involved, as they now focus on the props in the centre and the darkly lit letters pinned to the door but still see that this setting is a suburban home where evil should not commence.

I had the same precedure for my film poster. My first image was apparently too unrealistic according to my feedback, and actually looked like i had photoshopped the antagonist into the image. That was definitely not my plan. However, that is actually what happened, and i thought it looked pretty decent. But feedback tells you the truth as you see it from another persons perspective, not just your own. In this case, it was a media professional who had been in the business for years, and some of my fellow media students, so i received a lot of help and advice on improving it. Nevertheless, i kept the poster, and moved on to starting again with a new image. This is my finished Poster:

To make the villain stand out more, people had suggested that making him more of a silhouette would look good, so i totally changed the image to Black and White in order to do this. This also made the title stand out more as white on black defines it in itself.