Evaluation (3)

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Research into the target audience is key to success in any business and film making/distribution is no exception, in order to succeed, you need to know what the audience want. Not only does this mean the film's content itself, but all pieces affiliated with it; including the trailer, poster and any web ads. Distributors and advertisers often do group studies, surveys or look at recent data regarding popularity of different sub-genres and designs. Without this research, it would be a blind shot into the market, hoping that the film would be a big hit, rather than making it big.

In order to make understand our target audience more, multiple forms of research were carried out, these included an online survey (www.surveymonkey.com) and observation of those who went to see a similar horror film at the cinema. Given the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, the survey was shared out amongst friends which then periodically spread until enough replies were received to make judgement on the general target audience. The results of which can be found here. The observation part of researching into the target audience showed that the majority of horror viewers were teenagers, which were either in groups of friends or couples. As this matched with the survey data, it proved to be reliable.

The survey showed that "Psychological" based horrors were the most popular sub-genre, and this affected our choice in producing a trailer. Along with most people having preferred the psychological sub-genre, the results show that the deterring sub-genres were all but "Natural" and "Psychological" (receiving 0 and 1 vote respectively). A plague doctor which stalks his victim and affects those close to the victim can have a deep psychological impact on the person and this would make for an interesting plot. It also indicated that the actors in a film can affect the desire to see it, whether it be negative or positive. As it wouldn't be possible to get any world renown actors to star in the trailer, we used what was at our disposal, which, could result in a better outcome if potential viewers have any problems with particular actors.

In a viewing of the trailer, our peers had given us feedback, both constructive and purely positive, it resulted in needed changes of the trailer. The feedback included issues that were not possible to solve due to timeframe, an example of this is the acting of particular members featured in the trailer. Other criticism however included particular sound effects needing replacement, or adjustment in volume and these were taken into account accordingly. In terms of my poster and magazine cover, certain placements and colours clashed and so these were taken into account and corrected.