3. What have you learned through audience feedback?

RESEARCH
Before creating our teaser trailer, we conducted research among our target audience to find out what they look for in a teaser trailer and which aspects of it encourage them to then watch the film in order to make the best trailer possible to attract our target audience, so it was very important in determining aspects of our trailer. We conducted this research in various ways, predominately through the use of the website SurveyPirate (the link for which we e-mailed) and a poll on the blog. Despite not being as popular as SurveyPirate, the poll showed everyone who took part preferred an anonymous villain in a trailer, so we made sure to not expose the villain much. We only used very distant shots or extreme close ups, so the audience could only determine the villain as a male adult through the signs and codes we provided. For example the close up shot of the villain's dirty boots signified him as a dominant, powerful male. The SurveyPirate results were of more use because they were more concise and more detailed. They provided direct responses from those who completed the survey through comments and showed for example, that the majority preferred a teenage girl as a protagonist because she would be more vulnerable (stereotypically) which would add to the suspense of the trailer, so we conformed to this to start with by having her trapped but then subverted this by having her become strong and independent in order to express our views of how females should be presented in the media more often.

RESULT
We were able to see how effective the application of the research results were in our trailer in the screening at school, which showed all the A2 teaser trailers to AS and A2 media students. The AS students (who acted as mutual critics) were asked to fill out a feedback form, which was then returned to the creators of the trailers so each group received feedback for their individual trailers.
The feedback for our trailer was generally positive- almost all of them recognised it as a horror, although not many said it was a psychological horror. This showed us that although we successfully applied the results of our research, it was necessary to have more 'psychological' shots to confirm the genre. To do this we could have focused more on the theme of madness and visual distortion.

Most of the anonymous feedback forms liked lighting the most, which was encouraging because we paid particular attention to lighting in post production. Many also liked the sound and camerawork/ editing which we were also pleased with because we focused a lot on diegetic sound and experimented more with editing.

This feedback session showed us that we successfully applied our research to our trailer, so there were only a few aspects that could have been altered- such as the psychological aspect. For this we could have experimented more with editing by using time lapses and flash forwarding. We should have perhaps also studied films more directly related to the psychological, such as "Shutter Island" and focused more on character development to install a more definite link with madness.