What we have learnt from audience feedback.

In the process of producing a media product, it is very important to recieve feedback from others throughout the process to ensure that what you are producing is accurate and engaging for an audience. It is best to get feedback from others who are in the same position as you as they will know what critisms are fair and what would be asking too much. Also, it would be important to get feedback from people who do not know about the technical side of media, as for example with our trailer, many people who visit the cinema do not know about camerawork and technical codes, they are simply there for entertainment, we would want to know from their point of view if our work would be engaging and exciting and if it fits in with what they would expect to see in a horror film or trailer.

We gathered audience feedback in a number of ways, for example just asking people to look at our work so far and tell us which parts were good and what needed improving. We also did a screening of our trailer to the class, in which they filled out a questionnaire telling us what bits were conventional of horror films, which were the most engaging sections of the trailer and what they thought could be improved upon. Another way we recieved audience feedback was from asking our parents what they thought of our work and what advice they would give us to improve it. As our parents know us well, they would understand our full potential more and would be able to give us realistic ideas that they thought we could achieve.

Mainly from the questionnaires from the first screening, we got a lot of both critical and positive feedback. A few people said that some parts of the trailer didn't make much sense, particularly the letters scene in the trailer, they didn't know what the significance of the letters was. This was a problem as we originally had a lot more footage for that section planned and recorded which would have given the audience a much better understanding of it  however we had to cut it down significantly due to the time we were allowed to use. In the end we decided that as a teaser trailer is only meant to give short snippets of the film and not give the plot away, it would be okay to leave it how it was. Although we didn't change this section after the audience feedback, it made us question our ideas.

The feedback also suggested that we needed to add more music and sound, particularly at the start of our trailer. We responded to this by adding in more sounds, including a clip of Winston Churchill speaking, marching band snare beats and an old aeroplane sound which are all linked to the theme of war, which we were trying to portray in our teaser trailer as the reason behind the masked mans appearance. We also got some positive feedback, the most promising of which happened whilst our trailer was being shown. In various sections of the trailer a few of the audience members jumped and screamed, proving to us that our trailer was having the effect on the potential audience which we intended for it to have.