Richard Joyce

Evaluation: What have you learned from your

audience feedback?
Audience feedback is key and has been important in the process of producing our
film trailer. It has offered us the opportunity to examine, assess and adapt our
original ideas and plans to best suit what the audience we are creating the film trailer
for wants to see. Gaining the views of the audience has been important throughout
the process from the beginning to when the trailer was finished.

I created a survey using surveymonkey.com with questions related to the action

thriller genre that we wanted to use in the group. By doing research in to what people
preferred to see before we produced the trailer it would allow us the opportunity to
change some of the original ideas we had come up with and also give us an
advantage as we could create a trailer that suited as many people as possible.

I collected the results after a few weeks and created a series of graphs on my blog
showing the results as well as writing a review of how people felt. The seven
questions I asked were:

o Where do you feel is the best location for an action thriller film?
o When you watch an action thriller film, what do you normally expect to see?
o What period of history do you enjoy watching action thriller films?
o In an action thriller film, what sort of characteristics do you think are effective?
o Do you think the use of music is important in action thriller films?
o In what way do you think the characters in an action thriller film should be
presented?
o Do you think the use of violence is effective in action thriller films?

We were able to take the preferences of those who took the survey so we could
influence them in our trailer. At times this was difficult as some of the expectations,
for example the trailer to be shot in a city, would be difficult to achieve so we
therefore challenged the traditional convention and preference of those who took the
survey and used our own ideas to use our own personal setting in the quarry and
Faraday Room at school.

We picked up on some of the people’s favourite preferences for action thriller films in
the survey when it came to making our trailer as we used the concept of an
intelligent storyline and interesting characters as well as chase scenes which formed
an important central part of our trailer.

We were again able to fit in the survey takers preference when it came to the time
genre that they enjoyed watching action thriller films and crime being an important
characteristic for those taking the survey was also heavily influential in our final
product. Gaining this knowledge from those taking the survey was important when it
came too putting our film trailer together.
Richard Joyce

After we had produced our final film trailer and were happy with what we had
produced I sent a message to friends on the social networking site, Facebook, with a
link to our YouTube video, asking them for their feedback on what they saw. I asked
them to comment on what parts they felt were good, not so good and any
suggestions they had for improvements.

I received comments back and have produced them on my blog to show what people
felt about our trailer. Everyone enjoyed what they saw however there were
suggestions for improvements for us to take in to consideration.

These included suggestions that at times the speech was quite quiet as it was being
dominated by the musical background we were using. Also suggest improvements
for our newsroom scene which I expected as we tried our best to make it as
professional as possible with the hiring out of the Faraday Room, use of lighting and
the news styled background but it was still very difficult to achieve the professional
look that we wanted to achieve.

Peer assessment was also effective in the way we improved our trailer as we took
the ideas and thoughts from classmates and tried showing this in our trailer.

Overall audience feedback has been very effective in the way we have produced our
trailer. Our initial research and survey questioning allowed us to gain an
understanding of the preferences our audience had when it came to films in the
action thriller genre. And we were able to take these preferences and install them in
the final production of our film trailer.

Feedback afterwards was also important as it means we can understand the positive
side to what we have produced but also any suggestions for improvement which
could help us if we were to repeat a similar project in the future.