EVALUATION QUESTION 3

EVALUATION QUESTION 3

Audience feedback is a crucial part of the evaluation process, as it gives my group an opportunity to receive constructive criticism, of which we can register and use in order to make the appropriate changes to our trailer.

An example of a real movie that has done this is the 2012 hit horror, “The Women in Black “where Hammer films gained a whopping $14 million in the first 3 weeks which is the best in their history. The audience research for this film was extremely successful, mainly because of the fact that it was the first role other than Harry Potter for Danial Radcliffe, so there was an instant hype around the film. Harry Potter is one of the biggest film franchises ever made and has one of the most devoted fan bases in the world which means that this film already had a targeted audience in advance. It was made a 12A in the cinemas which was actually quite surprising for a horror movie of this style; this was done as it allowed the younger of audiences go and watch the film as a lot of Harry Potters fans are between 12 and 15. Overall this was a great strategy for Hammer film as they really listened to what the fans wanted and delivered.

The ways in which we were able to gain an extra perspective upon the quality of our work began with a class screening, where each group had the platform to share their trailers with the rest of the class. We were given a sheet of paper containing a positive and negative section where we all had the responsibility of noting down what we thought was good about the trailer and what we thought could be improved upon. This was an excellent opportunity to see what other people thought, as sometimes my own judgement was impaired because I was watching it so much. Over viewing the product caused me to reach a point where I didn’t know what else I needed to do to improve it. Our trailer had mixed reviews and some really helpful criticism which instantly began the development process. The main observations of improvement that my group was given were that:

-      The audio was too loud

-      The dialogue was muffled

-      It lacked in pace towards the end

-      Lacked in sound effects

-      Needed more effective music

This feedback was really helpful and useful, as we then got to grips with the imperfections in the trailer, and we knew what we needed to do to fix them. As a group, we got together and started to make the appropriate changes to the trailer in order to improve the overall quality. We started by swapping the sound around; we found that the start of the trailer to much in terms of the music as it built to much tension when not a lot was going on, and at the end of the trailer it was the opposite because there was more going on and the music was calm and flat. The audio levels were the instant change that we needed to make as they were the first comment that everyone made, and it was also the easiest thing to change.

The next stage was speeding up the pace, especially at the end, to create a more frantic feel, which is conventional in horror movie trailers. To do this I added more clips but made them a lot shorter so it was as if they were flashing like a heartbeat that gradually builds up. I found that this was a very effective technique and completely changed our trailer for the good, which makes me really grateful for everyone’s feedback.

We then proceeded to adding sound effects at certain parts of the trailer where they could fit in sync to the video, for example, nearer the end of the trailer there is the part where Mr. Creek is emerging from behind the main character and it is split into two clips, on the second clip there is a swiping sort of sound which makes it look like Creek speeds up and jolts towards the other character. There is also a crackling sound effect as if the audio is giving up when Creek raises his arm to touch the character’s shoulder, this was actually created manually from a piece of Velcro on my bag. Other sound effects occur at other times, such as a change in scene, the candle shot, the window shot and when the chair moves.

We did use another form of audience feedback being that we got a paper copy of all of the comments that people made so we could refer to then whenever we pleased. Below you can watch the draft and final trailer to see the improvements that we made because of the critical audience feedback that we received. You can also view the YouTube video of our class feedback and the notes that each group made. 

There is also the final form of feedback that we gained in this process, being the feedback for our ancillary texts (Movie Poster and Magazine cover). This was an opportunity for us to ask other friends and family to comment on our work about what they liked and what they thought could be changed or improved. I got this information by giving them a piece of paper and telling them to write it down; one box said positives, the other said improvements. I gathered this information and then created an overall graph of all the improvements and positives for my magazine and poster which you can view below. I have shown a before and after image of my magazine and poster because of this feedback to show you my developments. The images on the Left are my old pieces before the audience feedback and the pieces towards the right are my final pieces after the audience feed back. The video directly below is the draft of our trailer as you can see in the top left corner of the video and the one below is our final production.