1. Evaluation Question 3
When all of our classes trailers where finished we came together as a class to give positive
and negative feedback on each other’s trailers. We did this by everyone getting a piece of
paper and viewing each trailer at least twice, we then wrote down any good or bad points
about the trailer being shown. The audience (our class) age range was seventeen to
nineteen therefore it is within our target group so it was a big help to us. We received a lot
of feedback, mostly all the negative points where the same from each person, and we could
see that these were the parts that needed the most work. We could also see from the
positive feedback the parts which were good and made our trailer stand out from the
others. I was happy about the feedback and also watching the trailer on a bigger screen I
could see most of the criticisms anyway which we perhaps missed as a group. Not only was
the written feedback an effective way of reviewing our trailer, we could also look at the
audience reactions and see if the trailer had the desired effectat a certain time, for example
the jumpy part at the end.
We started to work on the negatives straight away to improve our trailer. Production
companies rely on feedback and the research they do to give them a start-up knowledge of
whether it’s going to be a success or not. Receiving feedback is definitely one of the most
important parts of any films production because, sometimes when you have created
something yourself you overlook small flaws that other people will pick up on straight away.
Included in the weaknesses we got from feedback were; the font used for the titles, too
many running scenes, the baby laughing sound effect came up a lot, the Facebook group
shot – this was because you couldn’t see the whole storyline from the trailer, the story line
came up which is connected to the last point, and finally the pace of the trailer was an issue.
We responded to this feedback to the best of our abilities and in the short time we had.
Some of the big negatives were easy to overcome such as the font which was easily changed
in Premier Pro, and the baby laughing sound effect which was again easily removed. We
shortened the chase scene, responding to the ‘too much running’ comments, and added a
few different shots in. another change we made was to the sound, we played around and
tried to get it to flow as much as possible which it previously didn’t. Some of the other
negative points where harder to change due to limitations in the footage we had and
without having to rearrange the whole trailer. Overall I was happy with the changes we
made because the positives will be more apparent as people will no longer be able to focus
on the bigger negative points.

2. We actually received a lot more positive feedback points that I personally was expecting to
get. We obviously had an idea of what we as a group thought were our strongest parts in
our trailer but it was good to have this confirmed by impartial viewers, also some people
picked up on parts that we hadn’t noticed and said they were really effective. As a group
one of our favourite shots was the ending shot of the person being hung, this was confirmed
as almost every piece of feedback we got had a positive comment about that shot. One part
we didn’t necessarily think would get good feedback is the part where the three characters
walking down the alley with the jump shots to the POV of the killer running down the same
alley, however this actually got quite a lot of good feedback. Another part which got good
reviews was the part in the church with the killer walking away down the aisle. We did put a
lot of time and effort into the filming of the scenes in the church as we found this the most
effective space to film in and also thought that this was the shots that reflected the story.
The feedback we got for all of these shots proved that it was worth taking the time on as
these were people’s favourite parts of the trailer. One part of our trailer that we weren’t
sure about was using the bible quotes as the titles. We got an equal amount of bad and
good comments for these and decided against changing them as they reinforced our
religious theme.
Overall at first there was as many negative points as positive points but I believe that now
that we have altered our trailer the positives definitely outweigh the negatives. We believe
that after making these changes to our trailer it meets the criteria and common codes and
conventions of horror which we aimed to meet.