Why is audience feedback important?
When creating a movie you must take into account how your audience will perceive everything which they will be shown from the choice of casting to the style of editing. Everything on screen will have some representation which can change the way your audience will feel during their viewing. This means it is important to gather research from all different types of individuals to find out how different people feel about the movie trailer and what they feel they gain from viewing it.
What did you learn from audience feedback?
Listening to, learning from and responding to audience feedback was a really important part of our trailer making process. We consider 'The Sanctuary' to be an 'original concept' in many respects and found audience feedback to be a reliable gage for audience interest. We also found audience feedback useful in identifying 'faults' or 'holes' in the trailer where viewers felt something could be improved or made clearer. Audience feedback can be accumulated in many different ways, and we found that the most reliable was Facebook. Facebook doesn't limit characters so audience members were able to leave detailed feedback. Using our sixth form centre's dedicated Facebook page was also useful as the students who follow it are our target audience age range and many are on our course, therefore able to give insightful and critical feedback.
Audience Interviews
We also filmed an audience feedback interview where we asked several students at Churchdown School to give their opinion on our video. This helped us once again gauge feedback on what we did well and any potential things we could improve upon.
From the Interviews we found that people:
- liked the transition from nice to gory scenes
- The voice over throughout the trailer
- The music which 'gripped me to continue watching'
- Everyone felt that the trailer enticed them to watch the whole film
- We could improve by refilming some shots at a higher quality
- With our audience rating our trailer from between 7.5-9.5 it showed that people enjoy the trailer and felt it makes them want to watch the whole thing
From the Interviews we found that people:
- liked the transition from nice to gory scenes
- The voice over throughout the trailer
- The music which 'gripped me to continue watching'
- Everyone felt that the trailer enticed them to watch the whole film
- We could improve by refilming some shots at a higher quality
- With our audience rating our trailer from between 7.5-9.5 it showed that people enjoy the trailer and felt it makes them want to watch the whole thing
Trailer Questionnaire
Our team issued a questionnaire focused on the trailer. We used these to get feedback that we could use to gage how the audience was interacting with our project. The results were mixed however we were able to use this to work out how we would appeal to alternative audience dynamics. A problematic area within the world of 'The Sanctuary' is that it is exclusively male, and we wanted to ask whether this affected the films appeal in the hope we would not ostracise any groups.