2. As a group we decided that setting up a facebook account for our trailer and ancillary tasks would
be a good way of getting feedback from our target audience. We called this group ‘Truth or Dare
Movie’.
Through this, I posted my magazine cover and poster and learnt that there were a few
improvements I could have made, for example adding red to the actual image on the poster so to
match the red in some of the text used which would make it more eye-catching against the black
and white image. Another comment I received was that my poster was very effective in representing
the horror genre and professional due to the similarities of the poster used for the horror film
‘Scream’ which I based my poster around.
3. When presenting my poster to our target audience of teenagers they all agreed that the font was
not of a typical horror genre. This criticism allowed me to improve on this with which I downloaded
horror fonts from the website dafont.com for Photoshop and chose to use face-your-fears. The
stroke effect of this font makes it seem like it has been written with blood, linking to horror.
However, I kept the colour of it white as I thought red looked too obvious and tacky, so only used
red on one word to show the deadliness of the film slyly.
4. Again, presenting my magazine cover to our target audience I received comments on how to make
the text more easier to see and to bring more attention on the promiscuous girl on the front. They
told me that by using the paintbrush tool on Photoshop I would be able to paint around the girl using
a colour that would represent the horror genre, making the choice of colour of the text easier to see
and more vibrant.
I decided to change the background
of the image to dark blue relating to
night time- a typical horror time
setting. This also caused any
distractions that were there before,
that being the wooded area behind
the girl, to be gone leaving the
promiscuous girl to stand out
against the plain blue background.
5. As a way of finding out what our target audience would prefer to see in a horror trailer we handed
out questionnaires. From the results we found that our target audience thought that a knife as the
weapon was more effective and so took this into consideration and decided to use a knife as the
weapon in our trailer. We also realised that our audience were structuralists and preferred for the
villain to be male with which we concluded that we would have the villain as male so to attract the
attention of our target audience. When showing our trailer to them they suggested that we needed
more of a range of shot types such as close ups, extreme close ups and shot reverse shots. They
said this was to allow the viewers to see the clear expression on the characters faces as the
audience would be a masochistic one and so using these shots would prove more effective.
6. Although at times we disagreed with our target audiences suggestions on how to improve our main
product we knew that as a group we were only a minority and we should take advice from the
majority of people. In doing this we realised that the changes made really improved our work,
making it more effective in attracting our target audience. Using questionnaires was also a
successful way to find out what our target audience preferred within a horror film as they were able
to give their own opinions with which we summed up so to include into our trailer.
These are my final outcomes; my poster, magazine cover and a screenshot from our horror trailer –
‘Truth or Dare’.
