Evaluation Question Three

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

What have we learnt from audience feedback concerning our trailer development?

We deconstructed the trailers of Franklyn, Minority Report, Nineteen Eighty Four, iRobot, Blade Runner, Gattaca, V for Vendetta, Equilibration and The Matrix. Our overall trailer convention list can be found here.

The most vital feedback we received was on our trailer. We uploaded the trailer to YouTube, promoting it through our personal Facebook accounts and through Twitter by linking it to trending ‘hashtags’. Our draft trailer had the following audience demographic: We found that most of our audience lived in the UK, most likely our friends through Facebook. However a small amount of people from the USA and Canada have watched the trailer also. We found that it is most popular with females between the ages of 13 and 24 and males between the ages of 25-34. One of the issues with the YouTube statistics feature is that anonymity allows for misinformation.

We made the following changes to the trailer because of feedback we have received:         

• We removed the shot of our heroine being dragged along the floor. This is because of the genre issues we had, our feedback led us to believe it may have made the trailer look like a slasher. We also wanted to decrease the importance of the romantic sub story within the trailer because one viewer told us it detracted from the thrill.
• We made the news montage shorter. This was for two reasons, firstly that our trailer was too long already and didn’t meet convention in this way. Secondly that some viewer commented that the pace of the beginning could be faster.
• Some viewers believed that the narrative should be clearer. However our research into teaser trailers as opposed to theatrical trailers told us that the amount of narrative we revealed was appropriate. Our teaser trailer research can be found here. 

• In terms of the sound element of our trailer, the audience noticed two errors we had not picked up on. Firstly, between the beginning montage and the political speech shot, we wanted silence to emphasise the sound of the tv static and coloured bars so as to illustrate a definite change. However the backing track continued between these few shots. Secondly, during the speech, the sound changes according to the setting in which it is being played. Between the hall and the pub, the sound continues in one way then the pitch changes halfway through the shot. We rectified both these issues thanks to our audience feedback.
• Lastly while playing our trailer in the controlled feedback session, we noticed that the sound was being compressed on the larger speakers which created level issues and unwanted noise. We found that on smaller speakers that this was not a problem.

Draft trailer:

Final Trailer:

What have we learnt from audience feedback concerning our poster design?

Our initial poster research included research into set out, archetypal poster designs and appealing to different audiences. We deconstructed the posters of Franklyn, Minority Report, 1984, Blade Runner, Gattaca, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, iRobot, V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, and The Matrix and then summarised what we believed were the conventions of posters within the thriller genre. We then took images we would like to emulate, turning these into poster ideas.

After initially designed our posters, we asked a small demographic of majorly teenage male and females to vote on their favourite design. These poster designs can be found here. We found that the most popular tag line was ‘A Society Fed on Lies is About to Get a Taste of the Truth’ and that the image of the Prime Minister, with it’s bright colours and contrasting text and background, appealed to this niche audience. When researching audience theory, we came to believe that our audience are between the ages of 18-30, are male, interested in thriller books and movies, are middle class, and are educated to a higher level.

(Although the audience we asked were not this targeted audience, it did allow us to get vital feedback.) From this point we developed our poster further using the feedback we got from our audience and from our Media Studies teachers. The main issue we approached was that of genre: we believed people were becoming misled as to which genre our film was. The use of the flag background suggested the social realism genre and the juxtaposition of the rebel symbol and the union jack suggested a political drama. In order to make the genre clear, we had to change the design to create a sense of a world alien to our own. We did this through the mirroring of the two images, black rectangles which censored the character’s mouths, a monochrome colour scheme with contrasting coloured anchorage and the static effect over the Prime Minister’s image. For our entire justification of our final design, click here. Due to the genre issues we have already explained, we believed that the second tag line was linking our trailer too extensively to a political drama and to some extent to conflicts like those involving the IRA. Moreover, we wanted our audience to be on the side of the rebel group, not have the choice between the two. Therefore we decided to use the first tag line; it aligns the audience to the rebel side of the conflict.

What have we learnt from audience feedback concerning our website design?

We began our website research by deconstructing the webpages of The Matrix, Gattaca, Blade Runner and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, then made a list of overall conventions. 

Our website received less constructive feedback, perhaps due to a less complicated design process and more easily met codes and conventions. To see our development post click here. The set out of our website, with central home page and two other pages, one for each opposing side, meant that it was easy to create. We created a sense of the contrast using different videos for the backgrounds of each. The feedback we received was limited to a need for a ‘back’ button to take the user back to the central home page. For all of our website research including website development, click here. Alongside the trailer and poster, the title font changed as we attempted to achieve conventions of the thriller genre. The overall final webpage design justification can be found here.

In conclusion, audience feedback allowed us to modify our trailer to improve its continuity, to polish up the editing and to fully achieve the conventions of our genre. It was vital to the development of our trailer and ancillary tasks.The full achievement of the conventions of the soft sci-fi thriller genre can be seen in our final audience questionnaire: