It is important, when creating an advertising campaign for a film, to get audience feedback along the way. It ensures that we are able to make sometimes subtle changes to our work that we might not have noticed as well as other bigger things that perhaps don't make sense to other people. This is similar to that in a real advertising campaign. It is important for a company to get regular feedback on their work so not only can they improve it but so it is suitable to their target audience which is crucial for particularly small companies. Although it is not as important with the work we are doing in class!
After we had created our first draft for our teaser trailer, we screened it to the class in order to get some constructive feedback as well as to find out the things that worked well. We handed out feedback sheets for the class to fill in and give us information about how the trailer stuck with the typical conventions of horror trailers and how effective they were as well as things that could be improved. Another way of getting feedback from people who aren't our age was to ask family members to watch the trailer on YouTube and tell us what they thought of it, this ensured that we got various viewpoints from both male and female as well as a variety of ages.
After the first screening of our trailer to the class and after analysing the audience feedback, the biggest fault that we found in it, which we struggled to correct was that the narrative was not clear, which although we didn't want to give too much away of the plot, we wanted the class to know what was happening. Another criticism of the trailer was that some shots seemed a bit pointless or confusing, such as the "washing up" shot and the "crawling" shot although we later decided that the crawling shot was necessary in the understand and the scariness of the trailer so didn't delete it. Other criticisms of the first draft included, low variety of shots, off-beat and ineffective music, the low speed of the trailer as a whole, and snippets of talking between shots that as a group, we hadn't noticed. Most of these criticisms we acted on which gave us a much better looking, faster, less confusing, scarier trailer.
From our audience feedback we felt it was important to give people a chance to say what they thought was good with our trailer. A few people commented on some of our best individual shots such as the "mirror" shot or the "gate" shot at the end plus the establishing shot at the beginning as well as the use of lighting in most if not all shots and how it stuck with the typical conventions of horror trailers. Other positive feedback included the use of our sound and how it kept the tension building, the sudden loud sounds such as the scream to end the faster selection of shots as well as the acting skills of our 'professionally trained' actors and actresses!
This is not forgetting the other less substantial feedback I constantly had from the teacher (SMa) allowing me to improve my ancillary texts and make them stick by the genre conventions as closely as possible.
Video Links (Click to access):
Cell 17 First Draft (Post E)
Cell 17 First Draft Audience Feedback Summary (Post E)
Cell 17 Final Teaser Trailer (Post A)
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