Evaluation Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Collecting audience feedback has been a key part of our coursework as it's important to hear un-biased opinions on our work. Some of these opinions may be negative, however we take all critisisms as constructive and use them to look at ways to improve our media products. We were mostly focused on gathering feedback from our target market, as those were the poeple who we pictured watching the film and had in mind during production. In this post I will be looking at all my feedback and what I have learned from it.

After completing our media products me & my class went to channel 4 and presented our trailers to a group of media industry proffessionals, below I have made a powerpoint presentation focused on the feedback I recieved from them:

After recieving feedback from the industry proffessionals they then handed out awards. Amazingly my group - The Possession won 3 different awards. The first award we won was for having the best marketing campaign, this meant that they thought our film poster and magazine front cover was really effective. This was important to our group as trailers and posters contribute equally towards persuading people to watch the film. The second award we won was for having the most original idea, we believe that this is because our synopsis is based on the london riots, which makes our film unique. The third award we won was for the best use of makeup effects, this is something we thought we deserved as we spent a lot of time making sure we had the right makeup during production, and we also went the extra mile getting contact lenses to help express the horror genre. In the photo slideshow below you can see scans of our certificates.

To collect more feedback I asked Leah, a student who is in The Possessions target audience to watch our trailer, and then record themselves giving 2 pieces of feedback - one about the positive parts of our trailer and one about the negative parts.

Positive feedback:



The first thing Leah said was that there was a great use of different shot types and editing techniques, during production we perposly used as much shot types & editing techniques as possible in a bid to make the trailer as exciting as possible. Leah then said the storyline was clear however we are still left wondering what happens next, this is good as it means we got the balance right and gave away just enough information in our trailer. Finally, Leah went on to say that our representation of youth accuretly reflected media stereotypes. This is something we did on purpose as we wanted our trailer to be as realistic as possible and challange societies views on the people that took part in the riots.

Negative feedback:



The first negative Leah said was that some of the shots in the trailer were poor quality because they were out of focus or shot in bad lighting. If we had more time when filming for our trailer we may have been able to re-film scenes whcih were out of focus and find locations that had better lighting.
Leah then said that some of our sound effects were repeated too many times, this is true and if we had more time or were ever given the chance to improve our trailer I would spend more time trying to source different un-copy righted sounds to help make the trailer more exciting.

Below is a video of one of my Classmates Hayley giving feedback on The Possession's trailer:



Overall the feedback Hayley gave was very good and it seems as tho she enjoyed watching our trailer. The first thing she said was the horror genre was very clear due to the use of the makeup effects and contact lenses, this means our makeup effects looked realistic and corresponded with simular effects seen in other horror films. Hayley then said that the soundtrack goes well with the trailer as both the lyrics and synopsis relate to London - this is the main reason why we chose the song for our soundtrack, the lyrics talk about what its like growing up in London, and the sound of the song also represents the kind of music most of the youth that were involved in the riots listen to. The final thing Hayley talk about is how she liked it when the music kicked in and the pace of the shots increased towards the end of the trailer. We are glad Hayley noticed this and we did it because we wanted to generate as much excitment as possible towards the end of the trailer to help persuade people to go see the film.

I also used social networking sites to collect feedback on our trailer by posting it online, in the prezi below I have looked at the feedback and shown where it was collected: