Evaluation Question 3

The importance of audience feedback from producing an ad campaign for the film is extremely important, as it allows the marketing department (who produce nearly all promotional material for a film including posters, trailers and even a page in a film magazine), in order to access the audience reaction and to make changes to try and improve it.

During the set-up screenings in our media classes, we gathered audience feedback by passing round sheets, these sheets had 4 main areas that dealt with our film including any constructive criticism. We also had sheets from other groups who wanted feedback on their film trailers as well. Each group's film was presented from start to finish and then we were given 5-10 minutes filling the feedback as well as our own feedback and most importantly what we thought of it, our own creation. I have to stress that the film we showed was only a draft and therefore was not up to it's highest standard, which is why we had so much negative feedback to begin with. Not soon after that we started on creating a new film entirely, because of the feedback we had received. We gave a quick preview of our film trailer, and we had much more positive feedback this time.

Most of the feedback we received was constructive criticism that related to our first drafted film horror trailer we had made. It wasn't practically positive, because it was directed mostly at the lack of narrative, poor sound use, sudden cut of music, confused by the some of the characters and direction of story and location changes. This feedback was hurtful to our group, however there was some positive feedback as well. Some of the audience actually liked some of our shots, including a shot of gull flying over and the foggy background. They also appreciated the scary angles and Sam, one of our actors in the group and his dark character.

With all our feedback received, we set about correcting all of our mistakes in our film trailer. It then became obvious that we had to re-do all our trailer. Not a problem though, because we wrapped all the trailer in a matter of three days. We responded to the constructive feedback by re-addressing some of the themes we had in our original film, and introduced a new one: madness and insanity. Improving our work we just set the whole trailer down in one of the college basements (we used two actually) and used flicking lighting and vignette style to darken the whole thing as well as brightness control. The result was a great improvement, as well as a voice-over from one our team, Brad Mercer, who provided the voice of the killer inside of our main characters head.