The document discusses the importance of receiving feedback from audiences to understand how a media product is received and whether it achieves its intended purpose. The author learned about audience feedback through research projects creating a magazine and movie trailer. Feedback was gathered from various sources, including a media studies teacher, classmates, friends/family, and online surveys, to get perspectives from different demographics. The author found feedback most helpful for improving aspects like visuals, sound, pacing, narrative clarity, and lighting in the movie trailer. Collecting feedback from multiple avenues helped the author tailor the media product to better achieve its goals.

1. Evaluation Question 3
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
When creating any media product it is important to
have a sense of who you’re making the product for
and the purpose of the product. As this is so
important, it is crucial to receive feedback from the
audience to see how the audience respond to the
product and if that was the purpose of the product
e.g. when making a movie it is important to know the
purpose of the movie, if it is a comedy then you’ll be looking to make the audience laugh and if you
receive feedback from the audience that the purpose wasn’t achieved then the feedback can be
used to as a learning experience for the makers. Feedback provides a vital opportunity to correct the
product so the aim is achieved. A technique that is often used is to provide an insight into how the
general population might receive the product is to use focus groups to provide audience feedback.
This gives the firms a better insight into the tastes of the general population so they can better tailor
the final product for general release to be as successful as possible for achieving its objective. One
movie that particularly successful at understanding its audience to be as successful was The Woman
in Black. From conducting audience research and collecting feedback they were able to establish its
primary and secondary audience to make a successful advertising campaign and achieve the aim of
making a successful movie that the audience enjoyed.
Whilst conducting my research into making a
trailer, and my research from the previous
project into magazine design, I discovered the
codes and conventions. Having discovered the
codes and conventions for the products I
would have to make, I focused on what people
liked about them and how I could use this
feedback to tailor my own product to make it a frightening experience. The feedback collected and
the products researched were focused on the sorts of products that my likely target audience would
be (15-27years old) into and how they might react to my own product.
In order to collect feedback, I used various sources to provide a wide range to gather the best
possible outcome. If feedback was focused on one person then it might only be enjoy by the one
person and not the target audience. By having a lot of avenues of feedback, it allowed me to explore
possible adjustments. Some avenues are more useful than others but it’s better to have multiple
sources of information so I can at least have the choice to change direction if I don’t like the
projection. There were multiple places I received feedback from.
One person, I found very important to receive feedback from was my media studies teacher. Whilst
constructing my products I consulted my teacher on my designs as he had a better understanding of
the codes and conventions than I myself have. He also has a lot more experience in constructing and
looking at products, so he was able to provide a lot of valuable insights into how I could improve my
products. He helped me a lot when I had a dilemma into how I should construct the products and
with his professional experience in building these products it was advisable to listen to his advice.

2. Another useful avenue for feedback was from my class. To gather this feedback, the class had two
screenings of everyone’s trailer and all members wrote down feedback for everyone. The two
trailers were initial drafts of the trailers and the final finished versions to see how we approved. This
was a really helpful as the feedback gathered from everyone was from people who were in our
target demographic. Everyone in the class was between 17-20 years old and this was around the
middle ground for our target demographic. This was decided due to horror movies being popular in
this demographic. This meant that the feedback was authentic and helpfully for making adjustments
as it was direct audience feedback from our target audience demographic. The feedback we receive
has been typed up and can be seen at the end of this document.
Friends and family were another a less element of my feedback but were good to have as they tend
to be more honest than people who don’t know me as well. This honest feedback was very useful
and it was good to have an outsider’s opinion because they often point out elements people who
study the subject don’t focus on. For example, whilst my classmates were focused on the
cinematography and lighting of the shot but my father pointed out that the dialogue of the shot was
a bit chunky and didn’t really fit so that outsiders opinion really helped polish off the product.
One area of feedback, that which we used to develop the
product in the first place, was from college students from the
college I go to. At the beginning of the project, we surveyed our
college peers to get using information from the target
demographic with a wide range of tastes. This was done by a
web service called SurveyMonkey and distributed on social media and email. We asked a wide
arrange of questions to get a general idea of the tastes of the age group. This is expanded upon in
Label D. This feedback given was used in deciding the general direction of the product but was more
of a directional tool with our original idea taking centre ground and the feedback shifting the
particular focus of the idea e.g. pointing us to adding a psychological element to the movie trailer.
The final area from which we received feedback was from people online. As the services we used
were free and online (YouTube, Blogger, Flipsnack, etc.), it meant that a wide range of people had
access to the content and could leave comments on the content. This meant we could have access to
a wide range of opinions from across the world. If we were a professional company this would be an
incredibly helpful tool, but due to the content we’re creating being tailored to a particular audience,
and the internet can have such a wide range of opinions, we have elected to take it in hindsight and
instead make the product we have researched the audience for.
From the classes feedback we were able to realise a lot of our mistakes but also what worked well.
This is what I learnt from analysing the class’ feedback and how we used that to improve. This
feedback was given an initial and unfinished trailer. We used this feedback to improve the final
trailer.
We had a lot of positive feedback for our trailer.
This was mainly focused on the visuals due to
exporting errors. A lot of people liked the
cinematography (e.g. the shots of crosses and
menacing shots of the demon). Another area that
people liked was the visual effects added to a
couple shots to create a certain feel for the shot
(e.g. the night-time shot with the “Night vision”
shot). The class were also impressed by our special
effects in the kitchen shot at night. This shot was achieved by using fishing line to pull open the

3. doors but so it didn’t appear in the shot as it is so thin. The final aspect that people liked about the
trailer was the montages at the beginning for the travelling shots and the finally intense thriller
aspect montage towards the end. These were effective in conveying the feelings we wanted the
audience to feel. Moving onto the elements of constructive criticisms.
The most common piece of feedback was
focused on the audio. This was due to an
exporting error but regardless of the error, the
audio was unfinished. As the audio was
unfinished, we were going to improve it anyway
but as we were watching a lot of our peer’s
trailers we picked up some good ideas on how to
improve our trailer. One idea was to add a scary
sound effect with the final shot/jump scare to
make the shot even scarier. This was done by adding the knife sound effect to the final shot. It really
rounded off the shot and as the plain shot was rather bland and with the added audio it created a
thrilling atmosphere. It also gave us a better idea of what sort of opening music to have with the
creepy piano music winning out over the upbeat happy track to open. One other addition to our use
of sound was using a creepy sound effect over some quiet images to create a creepy atmosphere
before creating the suspense later on.
Another issue was the pacing of the trailer. This was pointed out by multiple people but wasn’t a
major thing for a lot of people it just felt off for some. Regardless of people finding it to be a minor
issue, I felt that it should be dealt with properly as editing if done correctly shouldn’t be noticed and
the fact so many people felt it was off was an issue. This has to do with how the trailer was cut and
edited. Before people mentioned what they thought was the pacing problem, we had a general idea
that it wasn’t how we wanted it. This caused us to go back and look at professional trailers to gain
some inspiration. This ultimately worked out for the best and resulted in a well-constructed final
product.
One piece of feedback that was vital in improving the quality of the trailer was making the narrative
clearer. A lot of people were confused about the narrative which was likely due to my resistant to
too much dialogue but we filmed some dialogue
shots (the estate agent shot in the new home) and
they really improved the trailers narrative
structure. The dialogue focused on establishing
that the couple had moved into a new house and
there was a mystery to their new location. This
effective created an element of mystery to the
trailer which it previously hadn’t.
The final piece of criticism which unfortunately we
couldn’t correct was the lighting. This was very
common as it removed the authenticity of the
shots and made it the audience question the
reality of the narrative with the constant flipping
between day and night. This really hurt the trailer,
due to the convention being that darkness is
scarier than the light but with our trailer it didn’t
match that convention. This was due to limitations
to when we could film. In an ideal world the trailer’s lighting would be a lot more conventional but

4. unfortunately, this was not possible. This disappointing lighting can be seen in the mirror shot
above. This shot would’ve been much more effective with a better use of darkness. This is one of the
more disappointing aspects of the trailer.
After the final viewing, we were generally quite happy with the final product. The feedback from the
class was that it was a lot better than the previous version which was something we were very
pleased about. There are still elements that I personally would like to improve but from the
limitations to access for when we can shot, this is not possible (e.g. the lighting).