EVALUATION PART 4WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT FROM THE AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

By Dayna Pendergast

SECTION A To get feedback on our trailer we did a focus

group screening. I believed that this was a great way to go as we got feedback from everyone in the class with positive comments as well as some criticism. After the focus group screening we managed to make some drastic changes to our trailer and even add in some more filming. Our average score for the trailer in the focus group screening was

Overall i would say that we were happy about the feedback that we got as they were things that we knew we could work on to make our trailer more appealing to the audience and get more of the horror conventions on point.

POSITIVES From the focus group we got a few good positives. The

most common one we got was that the inter titles were good and that they fitted in with the style and music. With it fitting in with the music people also said that they really liked the music and that they liked how it had the name of the trailer in it. They also said that it gives the trailer a very creepy feel which is sort of what we were going for. I noticed that a lot of people commented on the narrative being pretty clear which was a relief as there is nothing more annoying than watching a trailer that isn’t put together very well it sort of puts you off wanting to see the film. People in the class said that they liked the camera angles however myself I thought that they could be better so put it on my need to improve list.

NEGATIVES The most common comment for the negatives was

that we needed more shots after watching the focus group screening our group totally agreed with this comment and knew that something had to be changed there. Then the use of more non diegetic sounds cropped up and they said that we needed to use more of them for example screams and zombie sounds etc. This was another criticism that we took on board. When we first started filming we only had two zombies so that’s what we used however the class picked up on it and said they would much rather watch it if there were a few more zombies in the trailer. The last thing that was mentioned quite a lot in the comments was that a jump scare would be quite a good idea to use and the ending would be far more interesting with it.

SECTION B The first change we made after the focus group

was getting more footage to play around with. We added a scene in a grave yard where we first see the zombies appearing and we added a shot of a hand popping out of a grave. In terms of sound effects we added in more rustling as there was a lot of walking through leaves and the woods but apart from that we thought it sounded fine without extra sound effects because we didn’t want to go over our music because there were a lot of sounds going on in that anyways. We also added more zombies in fact we used a whole class full of zombies to kindly act for us. I would say that all of these things improved the trailer but the one that made it the most was adding more zombies and more footage.

SECTION C

I feel that the evaluation screening went very well as it was the first time the class got to see them in our trailer. The positive comments were very reassuring that we were aiming at the correct age group for our trailer and also the correct audience. Our most common positive feedback was the music which was said to fit very well and gave it that zombified atmosphere. The second one was the amount of zombies we had in the trailer so the characters were a hit with the class. We still did get some negative feedback as well and as much as we’d liked to have worked on some of the things that they said it needed we ran out of time. However if we were to have edited it some more I would have made the inter titles a tad bit longer and changed our company production sign. But all together I am very pleased with the score we got because we worked hard and all together as a team.