Evaluation question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We screened our trailer to a class of people who were similar to our target audience, which was teenagers, aged roughly 17-19 who attend the cinema 1-3 times a month. Our target audience is this age and gender because after my group and I did some research, we found that the horror genre’s majority of the audience is Males in their teens to mid-twenties. We found that females aren’t as interested in this genre because the gore, violence and action doesn’t appeal to them as much as it does to the males. However, the class we screened this to had females in it as well. However, within the classroom the ratio was roughly 5 males to 1 female. This is representative of the typical audience of the horror genre as they are all young and a majority of them are males.

After screening the trailer to the class we gathered feedback from all of them which allowed us to gain more insight to how a real audience would react to the trailer, however, the screening was close to the deadline and we were unable to make many adjustments to the trailer if we had a lot of negative feedback on one aspect of the trailer as we screened this very close to the deadline. The purpose of this screening was to gather criticism and praise about our trailer. The group viewed the trailer 2 times, the first time was to be able to see the trailer as a whole and mention which part stuck out to them the most. The second time was to find anything small that they thought worked well, or didn’t.

The most common feedback that we received was regarding the statistics we used throughout the trailer. This is because of the ‘shock factor’ that it induced to the audience and made them feel uncomfortable, as statistically at least one person within that room would be stalked at some point in their lives. We included this in our trailer as we felt that a majority of horror films that have been released within the last 5 years have been based around an unrealistic or supernatural plot, as a group we preferred horror films from 1960-1970, as they revolved on how dangerous the typical person can really be. A perfect example would be Psycho, the villain is seemingly kind until the final scene where we see how dangerous he really is. We wanted to bring back the concept of not knowing what a person is truly like.

A few people within the group didn’t understand the empty Snickers wrapper towards the end. After hearing this feedback, we thought that we should add a shot of the final girl eating a snickers bar near the beginning of the trailer. The wrapper was to symbolise that she had disappeared without warning, and that snickers bars were her favourite snack. We used a snickers bar at they are advertised as a ‘man snack’ with the slogan being “get some nuts”, which links back to her being the final girl as she is shown as being quite masculine.

We got mixed feedback on the variety of shots used. Some people said that they liked the dutch angle and variety used, whereas others said that there wasn’t a wide variety. However, a majority of comments about the shots used said that we used a wide variety of angles and shot types, so we have marked the feedback stating that we didn’t use enough shots as an anomaly.

We received a lot of good feedback about the sounds used. The group said that they liked how it built suspense and a lot of people mentioned that they liked how the heartbeat went on for longer than it stereotypically should have, as it made them feel very uneasy and prepared them for the killer shot. Others said that the music was matched well to the shot type at that point in the soundtrack, when the music was suspenseful there was a shot of the killer, and when the music was quieter and calmer there was a shot of his victims. One person, however, said that they didn’t like how long the heartbeat went on for, and that we played on it too much. I agree with this person’s comment, as during the editing process I thought it worked well, but after playing it back without the ability to change it I noticed this flaw also.

The killer shot at the very end was filmed in a hurry, we didn’t have the time to film it as planned. A lot of people picked up on the roughness of this shot by saying that it wasn’t as scary as the build-up led them to believe it would be. I agree, I had planned the killer shot to be within the woods, the camera was to be handheld so as to make it feel like the audience’s point of view, to turn around and see the killer storming towards them with a bloody knife in his hand and a body on the floor. Instead we broke the 4^th wall which I thought worked well, as this is stereotypically frowned upon in media. We broke the 4^th wall to make the audience feel like one of his victims.