Trailer Third Cut Questionnaire

Upon creating the third cut for our trailer, Rhiannon and I decided it would be a good idea to collect some more audience feedback, so that when it came to re-editing it for the final trailer, I would know what to improve on and what to keep the same. Here you can see our first question, which is determining the gender of the people responding. This is important to us, as it will help us to see which gender our target audience applies to the most. This is something we would take into consideration as we want both sexes to enjoy our trailer. However, as we got an equal response from both genders, it did not matter too much.

This question asks our target audience to discuss their views on the sound work of the trailer. As you can see the response we got for this question were very positive as all respondents answered with ‘very well’. We were pleased to see this outcome, as we both felt that one of the strong points of the trailer was indeed the music. Consequently, this result ensured us that the music and sound effects we included, worked well for our genre which is horror. We therefore felt like there was nothing more to be done to improve this.

As a result of the previous question, this question had very limited answers, as it was asking the target audience to describe any improvements that they had for the music and sound. As everybody who answered seemed to like the music/sound/ nobody felt the need to answer this question.

For this question, more than half of the people who replied said that they found the Mise en scene ‘successful to a certain extent’. This gave us hope that we were along the right lines but that we still could do somethings to improve on.

This question allowed our respondents to further discuss any improvements they felt could be applied to the trailer, with regard to costumes, setting and general props. As the result to the last question, which people suggested that improvements could be made, we got some very helpful responses from these answers. For example, one of the main things which has been picked out for quite a while, is the fact that the ‘villains’ shirt was too bright a blue colour. Therefore, the audience did not feel that it was the right colour associated with this genre. Consequently, I went back into the editing process after this, and was able to tackle this problem by grey tone scaling the colour of his jumper. This is a comment further discussed in the editing process of the trailer.

Within this questionnaire, we tried to combat all of the main features needed to make a trailer successful. Therefore, this question deals with the different camera shots used. Within the trailer we used a varied amounts shots, such as close ups, mid shots and long shots. We wanted to make sure that this was effective to the audience, and from the response to the left, we can see that it was. Due to this good response, we therefore felt that nothing needed to be changed to this aspect of the trailer.

Tis question again allowed our audience to give a more in depth amount of information, seeing as they are allowed to have freedom when typing. This specific question asked the audience to say what they feel like could improve the flow of the trailer. Most of the people who replied said that they thought it flowed really well, however, to improve they suggested that the colours could be tone down a little bit as well as giving a hint to what was chasing them. In the editing process, I went back and toned down the colours (as it had also been mentioned somewhere else too). As for the hint, we felt that including any more information would ruin the effect of the trailer, as the audience would then not be interested in going to watch the film ,as they already know what happens..

This shows the response to the question asking about the suitability of the text on screen for our trailer. Not all horror trailers include text on screen, but as ours did, we wanted to make sure that the description of the storyline wasn’t revealing too much but also wasn’t giving too much away. More than half the people who responded said that they found the text to be very suitable.

However, the other text on screen was the name of the film and the ‘Coming Soon’ that appears. These are two of the most important features of a trailer, so therefore we wanted to make sure that our audience felt that they worked well.

Not many people responded to this question, which led us to think that there were not many improvements that were needed. However, there was in fact one response, that suggested that we could make the text on screen look more eerie. Both my partner and I decided against this, as we both felt that the font needed to be readable, and if we were to change it, It wouldn’t be as effective or as easy to read.

Finally, the very last question was asking our target audience to give us feedback on the overall entertainment factor of the trailer, and whether or not they felt it was intriguing or not. As you can see, the majority of people answered with ‘very entertaining’ and only a few people said ‘slightly entertaining’.

My partner and I were both happy with this feedback, as it meant that the main editing was finished, and it was only minor adjustments that we felt that we could make, to improve the trailer to the standard our target audience wanted.