Evaluation Question 3.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I wanted to get a lot of audience feedback from my work, primarily when it came to the initial stages of my construction process.  I mainly wanted to make sure that I was creating what the audience wanted from the outset so that I made a trailer that was going to be popular and liked by target audience.  I also did a lot of audience feedback when it came to planning and researching the type of trailer that I was going to create.  This was to make sure that I was conforming to the type of film that a modern audience would want to see. 

In the initial stages of my research, I conducted a questionnaire to see how often people watch films and to see how long people prefer to watch trailers for.  This would allow me to decide between creating a teaser trailer and a theatrical trailer.  This questionnaire helped me come to the conclusion that I was going to put together a theatrical trailer with a cliffhanger at the beginning of the trailer.  I thought that this would be a good idea to keep the audience intrigued into what is happening throughout the trailer, hoping to get some sort of answer.  I realised that this has worked well and also added a sense of confusion to the trailer that was designed to make people want to go and watch the film in the cinemas to see what would happen between the characters.  In the construction stage of my trailer I put together short sequences at a time and posted them to youtube and facebook to ask for feedback as to what I could change to make it look better or how to show the storyline better, which helped me a lot when it came to piecing together the whole thing.  The audience feedback that I got from this process allowed me to produce a much more professional trailer that showed information to the audience in a lot more depth, which is another thing that I wasn’t initial going to do. 

In regards to my poster and magazine cover I conducted a significant amount of audience feedback research, so that I could get the type of poster and magazine cover.  In the initial stages of my research, I asked the audience what film magazine they would be most likely to buy and the results conducted that there was a slight advantage towards Empire over the likes of Total Film and Entertainment Weekly.  This set up the branding for the name of the magazine, which worked will with the colour scheme that I went on to use.  I also tested two different photographs on the front of both the magazine cover and the poster and posted the images to facebook so that I could see what the audience preferred.  This helped me greatly, despite the votes being very close together, making it hard to make a final decision.  I think that it finally came down to the one that I thought was more professional and the one that people had more to say about. 

Overall I think that the audience feedback that I conducted on both the ancillary and main tasks, helped me to further the work that I was producing.  Without the feedback from the audience that I would be showing, I wouldn’t have been sure as to whether I was appealing to them or alienating certain people or simply not conforming to their views on drama films.  This is why audience feedback was a very important part of the production of my media and why it helped me create the best work that I could for the audience.