What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Throughout the progression of our trailer we have used audience feedback as a great way to make sure we are including everything our audience is expecting to see. We have been able to interact with our audience by creating surveys for them to complete, not only did these surveys help us to create the best possible trailer for our audience but it also allowed the audience to feel more involved and it gets them interested and connected.
At the beginning when all we really had was a simple idea of a story line and a genre, we created surveys that would be useful to us when we started to actually put together the trailer. these surveys consisted of a music survey, forms and conventions survey, mise en scene and titles survey. For each of these surveys we analysed the responses to help us see further what it is we need to include in our trailer to make sure it fits both the genre and what our audience want to see.
Click on the images below to see the analysis of each survey:
From the music survey analysis one of the main aspects we found was that the audience felt as though for there to be an emotional impact the tempo of the music should change. In parts of our trailer we wanted to make the audience feel on edge so in the survey the audience were asked what kind of speed/sound would make them feel on edge and the majority said that fast music would do this. Therefore when the trailer transitioned into the alternate world we made the music slightly faster in tempo as we wanted the audience to feel more on edge at this point to reflect how the main character would be feeling when she was transported into the alternate world. We also wanted this element of the alternate world to be majorly noticed as it is the main element which makes our trailer postmodern. Along with the majority of people who said fast music would make them feel on edge there was also a small percentage who said that slow music would make them feel on edge, when creating our trailer we felt that at points (such as when the government were watching the siblings on the CCTV) slow eerie music would be very effective to make the audience feel on edge and build up the tension.
There were a few significant things found from the mise en scene survey analysis. The first being that 70% of the people asked said that they would expect to see 2-3 locations in a postmodern trailer. Therefore when coming up with the ideas for out trailer we were cautious when creating the shot list that we had a range of locations, our locations consisted of, camp site, park, bus stop, underpass and a house living room. The second significant thing was that the majority of the people asked said that to make a scene more suspenseful a have a sense of danger sound effect should be used. This was helpful for us when creating our trailer as our genre is action adventure we wanted there to be suspense and an element of danger involved in the trailer. To achieve this we used sound effects sire music, thunder claps and doors slamming which really helped pull the trailer together and give it the effect we wanted.
One of the main things we found from the form and structure survey was that the most enticing part of a trailer for the audience is that they gain an insight to the story line and that there should be a cliff hanger ending to the trailer so it leaves the audience wanting to know more; they have to watch the film to find the answers to their unanswered questions from the trailer. From this information we made sure to include text screens within our trailer to give the audience a bit more information so that they can have a better understanding of the story line. Another element we decided to add to our trailer was a voice over as this will also help to tell the story more easily and the audience also said from the survey that they would expect there to be a voice over within a trailer.
The titles survey helped us a lot when deciding on how to present the credits and titles. One of the main things it helped us with was creating the film title 'Siblings' the majority of the people asked in the survey said that they think having footage behind the title would be better than having it against a coloured background, they also said that the footage should be moving and it shouldn't be a still image. This information helped us a lot when creating the title as we used everything the audience said they wanted and by having the moving footage behind the title made the title an interesting part of the trailer and we want the title to stand out as we need our audience to remember the name of the film so they can look it up if they are interested. To take this idea of having the moving footage with the title even further we made the font transparent so you could see the footage through the text as well, we felt this added an extra interesting element to our trailer to attract the audience.