3.What have you learned through audience feedback?

After recieving a lot of audience feedback we have come to several conclusions. After previewing the trailer to our specific target audience they were asked questions on what genre of film do you think the teaser it?

After analysing the results of this question we found that we had varied feedback on our genre. Most people assumed that the genre was horror, however we intended for the genre to be thriller horror. Through this audience feedback we have learnt that in future we would have to make our intended genre more explicit through codes and conventions such as location (however due to our narrative and low budget we stuck with the location of a house but this postively contributed to the effect it would have on our target audience). Therefore because we used an unconventional location of a house, we should have made adjustments to other codes and conventions such as involving fast paced editing, the narrative idea of involving a chase, surveillance, blood and gore, and a murder mystery type of style including police and crime.

How well do you think the trailer fits the intended genre?

According to the audience feedback it fitted the intended genre very well, however our intended genre may not have been what they chose. We felt the piece fitted the genre of thriller horror as although we blended the genres we managed to use elements of both, however we did subvert conventions, such as gender (by using both females and males), location (by using a house instead of a city setting), camera angles (no helicoptor high angle shots, and no tracking shots), costuming (no corporate clothing, or stereotypical white clothing on the victims - we decided to relate to our target audience through stereotypical teenage fashion), and lighting (we used daylight to film death scenes subverting the usual dark dreary lighting).

What do you think was the most effective element of the trailer was?

Our audience felt that our camerawork/editing was the most effective element of the trailer, and the least effective being our lighting. We agree with this to an extent as lighting was difficult without professional assistance, we could not achieve our desire of low level lighting with such a low level budget but in the future we could use lamps, torches and all sources of artificial light. Sound and props/mise en scene were equally preferred and we think this is fair as we most definitely feel that our editing/camerawork is our area of expertise however we could have improved the realistic value of the blood and make up in death scenes, and used a more varied range of sound, such as some dialogue between characters.

Who do you think the target audience is?

Our  feedback told us that our target audience was definitely recognisable. This is something useful we learnt from last year, so this year we made sure that our teenage target audience was obvious. We did this through the feature of teenagers, sexuality, alcohol and a party scene, all activites that would be familiar to a stereotypical teenager. Our mise en scene and location were purposefully chosen to relate to our target audience as they would feel more threatened by the events taking place in such a familiar looking place, and especially as the victims are the teenagers themselves. To broaden our target audience we dressed our cast in casual clothing, (i.e blue jeans/skirts and t shirts) as we did not want to include any social groups as this would narrow our target audience. We tried to stay clear of representing social groups by not allowing our cast to wear logos or brands, or stereotypical items (such as burberry hats, or chains and black lipsick) this way our audience can more easily relate to our victims and feel unbiased and not prejudiced towards them.

Most people thought that the target audience would consist of both genders, which is what we were aiming for. We wanted to appeal to a wide range of teens, so we deliberately used actors of both genders in our trailer. There is no specific targeting of either gender in the trailer, so we are happy that most of the audience thought that it targets both genders.

What was the most memorable moment in the teaser trailer for you?

We found that our editing photo effect was the most popular moment of the teaser trailer and this therefore shows that our strength lies within our editing. It also suggests that if we had the opportunity to do it again we would work harder on the sound and the ending of the trailer as this was one of the least popular moments. "Dead People" was the second most popular moment in the trailer which would also show a strength within our make up and costuming as it was memorable.

In conclusion from our audience feedback we have found that our specialist area was our editing, however other aspects we would like to improve in the future would be sound and camera shots. We could do this by using a wider variety of non-diegetic and diegetic sound, and creating more experimental camera shots to give a better representation of individual characters.