Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Traditionally, the film industry spend almost all their time and money on test screening films. Test screening is known as a temporary version of a movie to test an audience’s reaction. They do this by inviting an audience to watch, entirely just to find out what they like through market research. The film industry do this because it’s their only successful way of getting straight up to front feedback and a way of communicating with specific groups. They want varied opinions that will eventually make the film more popular and this will obviously make more money in the competitive film industry. Audience feedback is a technique institutions have been using for a long time to connect with target audiences, it gives them free entertainment and opinions that the institutions NEED – to make the film successful in the future. The clip the audience watch will not be the end product, this is done so lots of improvement can be made after constructive feedback is given. Our target audience for our teaser trailer was aimed at 17-21 year old's, as it sways towards a crude and comical piece. Primary audiences are those who receive communication – they are the decision maker. Secondary audience is a group of people that institutions identify, educate and activate hoping to influence the primary audience. During our preparation, we had many opportunities to get feedback from surrounding people in our class. There are three stages of feedback we received: Pitch presentation, rough cut and final cut. Our pitch presentation was our first opportunity to get some feedback from our class – which was to plan our teaser trailer, magazine and poster. A pitch presentation was a great way to spread all our individual ideas into a power point and see what we had all together. Getting feedback from class members gave us an opportunity to make improvement to eventually make our final piece more successful. When we first got put into our groups; we were told that we were going to make three products – a teaser trailer, poster and magazine for one film which we could make up from scratch – fun but hard work! The pitch presentation had to be presented to the rest of our class professionally, while the class / audience had to fill out a feedback sheet – giving our honest opinion and adding ideas. After everyone had finished presenting and all sheets were filled in. In our group, we read through the comments and documented it on our journal for future references to make our three products the best they could be. Our pitch presentation feedback was mostly positive, some ideas given were well out of our reach to do in the time and with the equipment we had. For example, someone suggested that we should have a really busy magazine and poster with certain elements on. We decided to prioritize our teaser trailer as we thought it was the longest / most difficult task to do out of the three.

The next type of feedback we received is when we had our rough cut finished. This is when we were finishing / at our final stages of our teaser trailer, poster and magazine. We showed our class this by

putting them all up on our macs and walking around the classroom and viewing them, taking our time to analyse all three products. Getting feedback at this point was of high importance as the products were coming to a finish, this gave us an opportunity to make last minute changes. There were set questions we had to answer, things like; strengths and weaknesses, improvements to be made, would you watch the film and does the trailer match a particular theme. Answering these questions properly, seriously and honestly enabled everyone to improve their products last minute. Our feedback included elements like; the genre is very clear as the piece is comical, good transitions show the effort made in editing, music is good and matches the theme, speech is not very clear so needs to be louder, the text could be changed to create more of a realistic look as it looks reasonably cheap. After receiving this feedback, our group decided to record a characters voice and put it over so it was louder, the text was also changed but didn’t make a dramatic difference / improvement.

Finally, when all three products were complete, we showed our class for the final time and got our final bit of feedback from a reliable audience. This gave us an opportunity to make any final changes before handing our products in, this part of the process which was called final cut was an important phase. After watching everyone’s teaser trailers – we logged into our youtube accounts and left comments, positive and negative feedback was appreciated so the trailers could get to the top standard. We got our poster and magazine up on the macs and walked around with post-it notes and wrote on them, this was a good way to give opinions as everyone was walking around and discussing which made the process a more enjoyable experience for everyone. The feedbacks for all three products are as follows: For the trailer we got told the genre was really clear because the events came across comical. However, one criticism we received was to make sure the clips go in a sensible order to represent continuity. Our poster got relatively good feedback, overall our poster stands out because of the colours and good quality photo but the editing needs to be more realistic so it comes across as a real poster, this is the same feedback we got for our magazine too. This last minute feedback improved our final pieces dramatically.