What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Summary:
To gauge how successful our groups media package as a whole was my group decided to present a questionnaire to a group of random people and get them to see what aspects of the trailer were effective and whether any improvements were necessary. After collecting in the results we came to a number of conclusions;
We asked whether or not people would go and see Lacerate at the cinema. 37.5% of people said they would but there was also an equal percentage who said they would not see our film while 25% stated maybe. These results show that we were able to be successful to some degree as people would go and watch our film but that we were not successful enough to make large numbers go and see it. After these results we can see we need to improve our trailer to make it have much more of an impact on our target audience. I have learned that to make a horror film successful and appeal to a large target audience is a tougher task than I first thought. We have had some success but I know that our trailer needs improvements in order to attract a larger audience.
Our target audience for Lacerate was both males and females aged between 15-20. Our feedback shows that nearly 80% of people agreed and knew what audience we were targeting. We managed to successful identify with our target audience as people were able to see which age range we were targeting clearly. It was vital to our trailers success that we were able to target our target audience effectively. We as a group have learnt over the duration of the course that effectively targeting your specific age group is critical if you want your film to be successful.
To understand whether our feedback group were regular film watchers we asked them how often they went to the cinema to see films. We were surprised by the results as 55% said they only go to the cinema on a yearly basis. This may have been surprising but with the surge in internet film popularity and apps such as Netflix it is to be expected. Overall going to the cinema is becoming less of a regular habit for a lot of people and we have realised that there has been a significant shift towards online media and that if you want to make a film successful you need effective and efficient internet marketing.
Seeing as it was one of our main ideals to challenge gender conventions/stereotypes in Lacerate we needed to see how successful we had been in the manner we portrayed the female protagonist Summer in our film. We had tried to present her as breaking the conventions of the stereotypical 'damsel in distress' and make our protagonist terrified but also tough, hard going and able to think on her feet. When the results came in we realised we hadn't done this in a clear enough or an effective enough manner. 44% of our feedback group agreed Summer had been portrayed in either a negative light or they were unsure, only 11% agreed she had been portrayed in a positive light. After receiving this feedback I realised the way we had structured our trailer and the scenes we used did not help or were not effective in publicising the message we wanted to show. To rectify this our group knows we need to reorder the scenes of the trailer slightly and perhaps incorporate some more effective scenes.
Moreover our target group was mostly able to correctly identify our trailer with the horror genre with over 55% voting that Lacerate was a horror film. There was slight confusion as a few believed it to be a thriller film (33%) with 11% thinking it was a comedy. Conveying the genre of your film effectively is something that we learnt throughout our study of the media course. Stuart Hall was one of our leading lights when we were conveying the genre of our film. I have seen now that I need to improve the features of my media package to make sure it is identified with the horror and follows the correct conventions.
When producing a trailer for a specific genre it is key to understand how often your audience watches your chosen genre as that will define how much money is made at the box office. The majority of our feedback group (44%) said that they rarely watch horror films which made it difficult for us as we had to change the way we marketed our media package to try and turn this around. The other feedback fluctuated between weekly, daily and monthly viewings. By using this question we were able to judge how many people would actually view our film.
Horror conventions have become set in stone and it is often a risk to challenge them and go down the path to originality, we attempted to find a middle ground between each path and due to this we received mixed results. 66% thought we only showed the conventions slightly meaning we had not done enough to make it stand out which we will need to address. 33% thought we had which shows we had some success at least. None of the feedback we received thought we had not shown the conventions of horror meaning we had managed to focus on the right genre at least.
Our overall media package was made up of more than just the trailer we each had to design a poster and a magazine cover to link with the trailer. Our feedback proved that we had shown the links between the 3 components clearly and effectively with the majority telling us we had shown it effectively. By creating a media package i was able to grasp how linking between each aspect is key and that it can have a big effect on how effective your marketing is.
