Evaluation: Question 3

"WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?"

From the audience feedback we received, it was clear that there were many specifics that were being demanded by our audience.  The main lesson learned when having seen our audience feedback was that it was essential to meet demands of the ‘target population’ for our products to be successful and popular.

The process of actually taking our audience feedback into consideration was a simple one, which needed time and also it was essential to be aware of the unexpected which could be drawn from the audience feedback. Once an idea was thought of, it was then processed into different forms of analysis and then our products were created. The term product is used quite loosely here as the most audience feedback we had was for the teaser trailer.

Firstly, once enough people had answered the survey which was 54 in the end, the responses were made into bar charts on Excel and this showed clearly what the leading vote was which we would then try to enact.

The name our audience preferred for our trailer

Mise en scene our audience most wanted to see

The attributes our audience wanted to be part of our trailer

Once the audience survey analysis was completed, we then proceeded to actually trying to conform to their feedback. Having sat down and discussed the feedback we wanted, when filming and creating our trailer we used the feedback to shape the trailer in the making. I feel that we were quite loyal in respect to this and fulfilled quite a number of their desires, they are listed as followed:

We named our trailer according to the most popular name chosen by or audience.

The pictures were the source of obsession we created on behalf of the feedback.

The unexpected twist was that our protagonist was actually homosexual and was in love with his best friend
whilst using anonymity online as a girl.

SURVEY MONKEY

The heart of our audience feedback stemmed mainly from the survey we created on Surverymonkey.com. We did this in AS, and the audience feedback was not taken into consideration as much because our film opening was created already once we got the results back so changing it would have possibly ruined our implanted ideas. This year it proved to be really effective because we learned that by abiding to our audience's preferences, our product would be amiable which means it would gain more popularity. Once having posed the questions to our open audience I then moved onto creating graphs to show the results which would give us a clear insight as to what our audience preferred. This proved to be helpful as it gave us innovative ideas that we even forgot about, so by doing this it gave us more variety to create as well as when having to edit. From our audience feedback we created:

• a montage
• a jump cut
• a time lapse 
• a source of obsession for our protagonist which were drawings
• and we also used a selection of locations that our audience wanted to see such as a bedroom, the school and different rooms in the house

WHAT WOULD WE DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

In terms of the survey, I would definitely make more surveys that would coordinate with the ancillary products so we could obtain maximum audience feedback and for our work to gain more popularity as well as achieving constructive criticism. Also, there are many things that we did not include in our trailer that people wanted such as ominous piano music as the main track. We could not include this because finding an artist to play a piece with a few glitches was quite difficult, so we used dub-step which had piano elements within it.

VOICE OVER

This piece of non diegetic sound was excluded from our trailer purely because it did not conform with our trailer. The voice over also ruined the suspense created within the series of the clips and the pacing was really difficult to get right. We had asked peers in our class to listen to the piece and we had responses such as:

"Hmm... It doesn't seem as effective with the voice over."

"No, take it out, the music makes it perfect!"

"I'm not really listening to her voice because I'm focusing on the different sounds going on in the trailer like the dialogue and that. It sounds quite monotone."

YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK

Facebook and YouTube were our final technologies we used to 'advertise' and promote our finished teaser trailer. These networking sites enabled us to get an objective point of view as well as the positive comments we received because they are public and the people watching it would be a disinterested party as they hadn't watched it before. This was almost like the breaking point because it determined whether our trailer conformed to our audience's liking. We were glad to see that our trailer was successful as it received positive feedback from both YouTube and Facebook:

We have 134 views and counting on YouTube which is relatively interesting because we don't know who has actually watched our teaser trailer. The graph below backs this point up and shows us clearly on a graph the breakdown of people from different countries watching our trailer.

From all of this it is clear to say that audience feedback plays a huge role in shaping the final products.