2. What have you learned through audience feedback?

Within the duration of our two year Media studies course we have developed our efficiency surrounding audience feedback to maximise what we could learn from it.

When we carried out our preliminary task we did not use any form of audience feedback. However, during our AS course, we learnt the vitality of audience feedback. We carried out a vague questionnaire to establish what genre our audience wanted, and what they expected from that genre. We used surveypirate.com as it was free and we could easily publicise our questionnaire across many platforms. We found the most popular genre to be horror, closely followed by psychological thriller.

Fig 1

We then established what our audience expected from the Horror genre through holding a focus group. The most common answers were:

-          Blood

-          A old, male killer

-          Young teenage victims

-          Torture

-          Death or some sort

-          A chase

We then incorporated these ideas into our research and storyboarding. Once we had established a basic narrative in the early process of storyboarding, we held a second focus group to establish how our target audience felt about narrative. ( Audience Theory -Narrative Theory - Genre Theory... click here)

 We were also able to target a specific group of people, who we thought to be our target audience. We established our audience’s expectations, which were very similar to those listed above. We then asked for their response when we subverted these conventions or added a twist to the plot. This was very successful for understanding how audiences feel, what makes them feel uncomfortable and  what shocks them. One of the most uncomfortable and shocking scenarios was a female child killer, so we expanded this idea and made it a key feature of our narrative. However, after this point we did not continue to use audience feedback, and just worked with our own opinions and ideas to create the final film opening.

Audience feedback proved vital for the success of our A2 teaser trailer (click here). During the course we learnt to use our audience responses appropriately and effectively to maximise the success of our final product. We learnt to use audience feedback as a guideline to give us structure and purpose, but we decided to purposely not always give our audience what they wanted or expected, which keeps our trailer unique and original from anything else in the film industry at the moment.

Initially we held a focus group to understand our audiences’ expectations about film plots, narrative, teaser trailers, and genre. We found that they wanted the genre to be clear in the teaser trailer, and for it to give a hint at the plot but keep most of the narrative hidden, as if we gave too much away, our audience would be put off from watching the film. We the developed the response we got from this by continuing the focus group surrounding the horror genre, (the most popular genre from the previous focus group,) and asked the group about their understanding of werewolves as we explored the idea of the supernatural subgenre, as this was an idea we were experimenting with. We found our audience only knew the basics about werewolves, transformation at full moon, death by silver bullet ect. Because of this, we noticed that 'the supernatural' as a genre was having a revival at the time, with the 'Twilight saga' starring vampires, and the Zombie remake 'The Crazies'. We wanted to create a teaser trailer that would be current and fitting with today's film industry.
(A History of The Werewolf - click here)

After conducting the focus group we decided that although creating a werewolf teaser trailer would be challenging, it would however, fit nicely into the film industry. We explored werewolves further and sent out a questionnaire about a specific type of werewolf; Lycans, who can control when they transform. Our audience knew next to nothing about lycans, which we felt could play to our advantage and be a mystery. This idea is something that has never done before, so we were excited to create something completely innovative.

Next, we researched into what our target audience desired onto when they became fans of a film. We found a group of teenagers, known as Teenage Werewolves who latched onto a sense of belonging and identity that werewolves gave them. We explored the potential for bringing this feeling of community to our trailer be decided it was too challenging to incorporate into a horror werewolf film.

We also got our target audience to watch our trailer whilst it was under construction to get constant feedback and trailer it to their requirements. They decided our initial sound track, drum ‘n’ bass, was crossing subgenre into zombie, which although was still within the supernatural genre, meant our genre was not as distinct as we had hoped.
(For Drum 'n' Bass soundtrack - click here - 1:35 onwards)
This meant we changed all our fast passed editing to fit a dark slow chant, which gave and more historic feel to the werewolf trailer,

After we constructed our final product, we held a showing for our teaser trailer to a stratified sample of our target audience. We asked each viewer to fill out an audience feedback sheet, asking them for their opinions on:
- the clarity of our genre
- which part of construction; mise en scene and costuming, sound and editing, lighting and sound or camera angles and shots, was most effective
- who our main target audience was
- which part of the trailer was most memorable

From the results, we established that our subgenre, werewolf horror, came across effectively, although some people thought it was more thriller than horror, but this was only a minority. We found sound and editing were successful in our construction. The majority of people found the establishing shots of the moon and Dungeness (other location research - click here )had a greater long lasting effect than the fast cuts, which for us, was quite surprising as the footage in the fats cuts was created to be shocking, such as the dying child. The group thought our trailer was aimed at male teenagers and adult more than any other audience group.

We learnt to never predict answers, as audiences are erratic, and to use the information they provided carefully. We fulfilled their dominant expectations, about genre, sound, editing, and so on, but subverted their expectations surrounding details, such as the type of werewolf. We think this helped to make our trailer successful and original.