What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We presented our trailer to our classmates so they could make notes and give us feedback on how well they though our trailer worked, considering it as a horror text and a teaser trailer. Our classmates are also in our target age group so it was very helpful to gain information from the people we are aiming to represent. Audience research is vital to the success of a product. It's a great way of finding out what the audience thinks, so you can adapt it to their wants and needs, giving it the ability to survive.
Once our trailer had been viewed, everyone took it in turns to tell us the things they considered were good, and the things they though didn't work so well. We wrote down everything they said so that we could then go back and change our trailer.

We had issues with: Intertitles, lighting, the protagonists, editing, and the voice over.

Intertitles:
We had a plain and easily to read font, and we'd tried to create a background that looked like water to connect with the water theme in our trailer. However, when the trailer screened the blue water background seemed to become almost purple and quite harsh on the eyes. The vast majority of our audience informed us that the background was pretty bad, and they all thought of it as quite a "physcadelic purple background". No one could tell that it was supposed to be water. We took this information and changed our intertitles to plain black with white font.

Lighting/mise-en-scene:
The lighting and setting of the beginning of the trailer was very popular. The day time lighting made it clear and easy for our audience to see everything. Our audience liked the bathroom setting as it looked quite old and it was quite a different setting compared to some of the other trailers that had been shown. However, during the second half, not many people could see what was going on as the filter we had added made it too dark to really see. We had also filmed it in a college drama cupboard in an attempt to represent an attic, as it was full of boxes and old objects. Our audience could tell that it wasn't an attic, although they said it wasn't a major issue. We then went and removed some of the filters on the second half to make it easier to view.

Protagonist issue:
Our audience couldn't work out who the protgaonist of our trailer was. The trailer contained two women, who's faces wecouldn't really see throughout the trailer. This means that our audience couldn't connect with them. The result of this feedback was us re-filming part of the end where we could see Chelsea's face a few more times, and also filming some more shots of the music box which secured its position as an enemy in the movie.

Editing:
Some of our audience didn't understand the connection between Becci's part at the front, and then Chelsea's part at the end. We had included intertitles which indicated a change of date but these clearly didn't work very well. Also we'd tried to include a sequence of fast cuts to create a sense of fear and possible attack, but our audience claimed that these were too fast to concentrate on. As a result of this, the previously mentioned re-filming helped the understanding that the girl at the end of the trailer was going to come under some attack, whereas before this was not clear. We also removed some of our fast cuts and slowed it down slightly so it was easier to watch. Other than this the editing was well received.

Voice over:
We had a voice over where Chelsea found the music box. It was a female voice saying "The past can come back to hant you, I should know, it's happening to me". We'd added an effect on this to make it sound my 'creepy' or 'ghost-like' however, this made it very difficult to hear. Also, the voice was whispering which didn't go well with the effects put on it. Our audience also wanted to hear a voice over, over Chelsea's part at the end as there was a big gap of watching her where there was just music playing. To change this we removed the voice over and replaced it with another one that was very easy to understand, saying "What will you do when the past comes back" three times. We did place a filter on it too, but it didn't change the ability to hear it well. We placed this voice over on Chelsea's part, almost as if to hit two birds with one stone.