What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We recently held a screening in one of our media lessons to show everybody's trailer and to get feedback from the rest of the class, we watched each others trailers and wrote down what we liked or disliked about them and when our trailer was shown we wrote down what our class mates liked or disliked about ours.
Our target audience was around the age range of 18 - 30 years old and by screening the trailer in our class we got our exact target audience's feedback.
My audience research was taken purely from the feedback my media class gave back to my group as we did not have the time to interview and hold a screening for other members of the college to gain feedback from.
I think overall we discovered where the strengths and weakness's of the trailer are and how we can improve on them.

Positive Feedback

Many members of the class liked specific areas of the trailer because of the elements of horror that we had used in certain scenes. *

- Well edited and well timed throughout. *The pace increased heart rate and had a good suspense.
- The walking scene at the end of the trailer. *This is very conventional of the horror genre since "The Ring" came out.
- The dragging away scenes. *Creates a sense of danger/death.
- Red filter to create a sense of blood.
- Extreme close up of the eye at the end.*This is shown as staring the killer in the eyes which can cause the audience to feel quite awkward/scared
- Fuzzy/distorted filters. *A sense of unfamiliarity.
- Lighting.
- Head grab scene.*Scary and also panic for the female character.
- Shaky cam in the running scenes.*Panic due to the illusion of the character being chased.
- Dream like quality. *A sense of dreaming/unrealism


The target audience disliked certain elements of horror and they also disliked certain aspects of the teaser trailer.*

Negative Feedback
- Too much of the same shot - Tree walking shots. *A good sense of suspician about the killer but too over used so it isn't seen as scary any more.
- A bit too slow paced. *Not much of anticipation to get the audience scared.
- No narrative. *No continued story to create a familiarity to the characters.
- Interior shots. *Not as good as the exterior wood shots.
- Unreadable inter titles. *Unable to understand the titles so you can't really become scared by the story.
- Too much of one character. *No collaberation between the other characters so it only really shows a one person storyline.
- Needed a jumpier ending. *No jumpy ending to make your scared and anticipate worse scary parts in the film.

The music used in the trailer had a mixed review within the class many people thought it didn't quite go with it because it was quite slow, others thought it was good and dreamlike and then a small selection thought it worked in some areas but not in others.

The negative feedback about there being no narrative is good but we did actually have footage of the characters driving to the woods, getting things out of the car etc. but we decided not to use it because it just didn't fit in with the effect we wanted to achieve and it just went on for a bit too long and I think that this was the main reason that some people may not want to watch the film, many members of the class said that if the trailer had a narrative then they would want to watch the film.

I think the feedback we received was really good because it gave us an insight from the audiences point of view rather than that of our own and we now know where the areas in the trailer are good and where there is room for improvement and I think that as a result from our screening and seeing the trailer from another persons point of view there would be several things that I would change.