What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Once our horror trailer was completed we needed to collect feedback on it from people in our target audience. Seeing as our class is part of our target audience we were able to screen the trailer for them and ask them for feedback. There were a number of points that were made numerous times once the trailer had been shown so this feedback was very useful in determining what would have made a better trailer. There was negative and positive feedback from the group.

A very common piece of feedback that we received was that the soundtrack didn't really fit too well with the trailer. Some people thought that the music at the start of the trailer sounded too childlike and it made them feel that there would be some element to the film that involved a creepy child, which there isn't. Some people also thought that the music at the end didn't work too well and that when the first piece of music changed to the second it didn't sound very good. However even though we did get quite a bit of feedback saying that the soundtrack didn't work very well, we also got some people who said that they thought the soundtrack did work well and built tension nicely.

The inter-titles in our trailer split the class roughly down the middle. Some people thought that the effect we had on the inter-titles worked really well and made them look much more interesting but others thought that the effect was used too much and this made it quite difficult to read. A number of people also voiced there opinion that they thought there wasn't enough narrative given away in the trailer and perhaps voice overs would have helped it along. I feel that maybe these people were ones who couldn't read the inter-titles very well because the inter-titles do in fact introduce the narrative of the film.

The fact that most of our trailer was using handheld camera work also split the class. Some people really liked the use of a handheld camera and others thought we overused it. We got a number of people commenting on how they thought the camera work when the characters were entering the attic was very good and interesting. However we also got a lot of people commenting on how the handheld camera work during the second half of the trailer, when the characters were in the graveyard, was a bit rough and too jumpy. They felt it made it hard to tell what was going on.

We also got some other negative feedback. A couple of people mentioned that they felt the stabbing scene at the end of the trailer was too repetitive and that it should perhaps be cut down so it is shorter and there are less stabs. Another person said that they didn't like the 'Bad TV' effect that we used on the house shot at the beginning of the trailer. Someone also pointed out that on the shot of Emma's character getting dragged down the stairs you can hear Emma's laugh slightly at the end of her scream.

People seemed to like the shot of Emma's character getting dragged down the stairs as it fitted to the horror genre. We also got feedback from a few people who liked the idea of finding an old book. However I now realise that it is unclear that it is meant to be a diary in the trailer. As a whole people did like the use of hand held camera work and felt that it fits with the genre and the style of the film.

We got a variety of feedback when we did the screening to the class which pointed out a number of things that could have been improved to make the trailer better. We also got some positive feedback which allowed us to know what parts of the trailer people thought worked well.