Evaluation Question 3 – What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our social message we wanted to our teaser trailer to convey to our audience was the stress placed on young people, the pressure of being popular.
To develop this theme into a more concise concept for a film idea we researched our target audience to see what they would want.

• We distributed a survey amongst teenagers within the age bracket of 16 to 19, as this is who we chose to be our target audience.
• Gained a better understanding of what our demographic would expect from our chosen genre of slasher horror.
• The purpose of our survey was to use it to start developing specific ideas for our trailer which our target audience would find appealing.
• Some questions we asked were supportive of our previous research, for example asking about female antagonist was reflective of our deconstructions into horror films with female killers such as Jennifer's body and The loved ones.
• The survey was a way to help decide how we should storyboard our trailer, fast or slow paced and what the main focus should be; characters, locations or action. 
• We decided to gradually build pace from slow to increasingly fast, further trailer deconstructions like The Hunger games showed this to be a convention also.
• We did not know where our main focus should be but from audience feedback we were surprised to see that our audience wanted an establishment of characters within the trailer alongside action.
• We formed our storyboard around this idea as at the start of our trailer we have shown our victims as well as antagonist before fast paced torturous action building towards the end of the trailer. 
• One thing we chose to ignore from the results was the audience’s preferred age of the victims which was mixed ages. 
• Our original concept of having a ‘family’ as the victims fitted the majority of the audience’s opinion however casting was difficult and unreliable so we decided to have teenage victims as they were more accessible actors so went about casting 'friends'.
• The questions which assisted us the most were mise en scene, music and location as they helped narrow down the specifics of our trailer.
• Unsure of location of our trailer, whether it be set exteriorly or internally, and if more than one location would be needed 
• Audience response was that both exteriorly and internally locations wanted to be seen. 
• We followed this, so the first half of the trailer establishing characters was outside in our chosen exterior location and the torture scenes in an internal dungeon location reflecting the forced confinement of the victims and their entrapment.

Music 

• We were unsure of what music would be suited to the trailer and so this was an area in particular we wanted to see our target audience’s response.
• 53% voted slow, creepy music would be most effective so we used jewellery box music which was very unsettling alongside torture. 
• 51% of our audience said that screaming sound effects would be most appropriate, so we used this sound effect to end the trailer.
• Also found this to be conventional of horror trailers to leave the audience with a jumpy scare.
• We wanted our trailer as it was going to be fast paced jump cuts to be visually exciting so our mise en scene needed to be effective.
• We researched whether our audience would find face make up effective to create a scary, horrifying effect. 
• The result being 90% made us continue with this idea and test different make up looks to see which would work best, one being face paint and the other 3D gel.
• Our final make up looks as though a smile has been cut into the victims face, this created the most horrific, gruesome result.

The audience feedback was helpful in assisting our decisions about what our trailer should consist of and how it should look in order to be an effective horror trailer which is appealing to its target audience.

Amy Freeman