The filmmakers gathered feedback on their rough cut teaser trailer from their target audience. Based on this feedback, they made improvements to the music, pacing, and clarity of the plot in the teaser trailer. Later feedback on the nearly completed teaser trailer, poster, and magazine cover highlighted strengths like branding and areas to shorten the teaser trailer. The filmmakers used this feedback to further refine their projects.

1. What have you learned from
your audience feedback?
Evaluation Question 3
Nicholas Randall

2. Film Industry Audience Feedback
The Film Industry spend so much time and money either test screening films and
finding out what the audience liked through the market research.
To find out a target audience they require people from different areas of the country
that are different ages and gender. They will then get the audience to complete a task,
For Example this could be to fill in a questionnaire, this will give the filmmakers an idea
of what their target audience is. Film-makers may also use Pearl and Dean Business to
find other films of the similar genre to find what type of audience went to watch their
film. We used this when finding our target audience.
Doing a test screening with the correct target audience allows a fresh pair of eyes to
view the film, and as they haven’t been in the process of making the film, they will be
able to see if any parts of the film needs to be removed or added and if anything
should be changed. This can help the film to be as successful as possible.

3. Our Target Audience
To find out our target audience we gathered a few films that was similar to
our film in terms of genre and narrative. These films were The Hunger Games,
Skyfall and The Avengers.
The AvengersSkyfall
The Hunger Games
Source: www.business.pearlanddean.com

4. Our Target Audience
From looking at similar films to ours, we found out that are target
market was mainly people aged 15-24. Although there was a higher
number of males compared to females in this research we gathered,
but the results were close in The Hunger Games (Our main source,
as the film is very similar), but in other sources the percentage was
spread out, meaning that we are unable just to say that our target
market is males. But a higher number of males may watch our film
instead.
Source: www.business.pearlanddean.com

5. When did we ask for feedback?
We asked for feedback once we had put our shots into the timeline in the correct order. We
didn’t focus on the sound or special effects, but we just wanted to see the rough order of
our teaser trailer. Once we had our rough cut we asked for some feedback, which we found
really useful. We got this feedback on a sheet, that highlighted how good or bad the
microelements were (on a table), and then there was a section to leave things that were
good on the rough cut and things that could be improved. I then took this sheet and put all
the information into a table, so I could place it in my Blog as well as share the information
within our group.
Once we gained this feedback we worked on the teaser trailer, as well as the poster and
magazine cover and once we was nearly finished with all 3 products we asked for more
feedback on all 3 products. This left us with just enough time to correct the small issues that
was raised within the feedback. This feedback was gained through YouTube, where our
audience would write what we did well as well as what we could improve.

6. Feedback – Rough Cut
We asked our target audience for feedback on our rough cut. We didn’t focus
on sound or special effects, we just focused on the order of the teaser trailer.
We asked our audience to mark our micro-elements (Camera, Sound, Mise En
Scene and Editing) from “Very Poor to Excellent”. We also asked for
comments on our strengths and weaknesses of our teaser trailer. Overall we
gained either Excellent or Good for our micro elements. Our main strengths
gathered from our feedback are the use of camera angles/ movements,
editing style and the good use of split screen. The main improvements that we
got from our feedback was that we could have used different music to suit a
teaser trailer and to also suit the narrative of the film. The middle of the
teaser trailer was a bit slow and our teaser trailer could be shorter. The final
improvement was to make the plot of the film easier to understand.

7. How did we improve?
Our feedback session was useful as the audience saw improvements that could be
made, which we didn’t really see to start off with. This ‘fresh set of eyes’ to the teaser
trailer helps us find improvements to our teaser trailer.
Our first improvement was the music, this was pointed out the most, and would require
the most time to get it right. We then researched many other teaser trailers and
listened to the music, we then had a brief idea of what we wanted our teaser trailer to
sound like. We used the loops in Garageband to create our soundtrack for our teaser
trailer. We also added ‘boom’ sound effects before a black screen, which is what we
saw in many teaser trailers. We also decided to add a voice over as it was said in our
feedback that the plot wasn’t very clear, a voiceover should fix that. We also made the
middle of our teaser trailer much faster in pace, which overall made our teaser trailer a
lot shorter than it originally was. By increasing the pace made the teaser trailer actually
feel like a teaser trailer and gave a sense of what the film is like.
Music we created
in Garageband
with loops

8. Feedback – Nearly Completed
This time we gained feedback for all three of our products
(Teaser Trailer, Poster and Magazine Cover). This time we
asked our audience to comment on our Teaser Trailer on
YouTube, where they could suggest more improvements but
also say what we got right. Overall our audience liked our good
use of sound, as well as the voice over, as it was effective and
helped to tell the story. We had a variety of camera shots and
all the shots were in focus, which the audience really liked. For
the poster and Magazine Cover, the audience liked how we
created a brand identity through the use of colours and the
fonts we used for the titles. We used the same font
throughout our products, we also increased the size of the ‘V’
in our title to make it stand out and to create a brand that will
be recognizable. The audience thought our teaser trailer had a
good storyline and fits well with the genre. The only
improvements that were said was to improve the fonts in our
teaser trailer (At the end of the teaser), and to make the
overall length of our teaser trailer shorter.

9. How did we improve? – Duration
This Feedback session helped us to see what we got right, as well as changing a few little
bits that would improve all three of our products. The main issue that was brought up
was that our teaser trailer was too long. We researched at the start of this project that
we wanted our teaser trailer to be around 1minute 20seconds. Before this feedback
session our teaser trailer was around 1minute 50seconds. Which seemed a bit too long
from what we saw in our research. We made changes like making the fight scene a bit
faster, to cut down the shots. We also found a few shots that could be cut down, as they
were too long, and had a couple of seconds that was useless to the teaser trailer. So we
decided to cut all this down to increase the pace of the teaser trailer, but to also make
our teaser trailer much shorter, which was picked up on in our feedback session.

10. How did we improve? -
The other improvement to make was to change the titles at the end of the
teaser trailer that said “COMING SOON”. After looking at these titles again, we
agreed with the feedback and we changed the titles to fit with the genre and
to also make it feel like a big blockbuster teaser trailer. We looked at the
Hunger Games end titles and got inspiration from them, as their titles are
central and look like something from Hollywood. Our end titles before were
small and didn’t fit the genre of the teaser trailer, but we have never seen
anything like this in a teaser trailer, so we decided to change it. We used final
cut pro x to change the font of the title to something more dramatic, with a
animation of the titles that we saw on the Hunger Games teaser trailer (where
the titles zoom in and out). We changed the colour of the titles to fit the
narrative of our teaser trailer to make it fit our film.
The Hunger Games end titles

11. Other Feedback
We was also given feedback outside of these feedback sessions, which also
helped us improve our final products. One of these comments was to change
our poster, as it was too similar to our magazine cover. We changed the
background of our poster, as before it was the same as the magazine cover.
Although we still wasn’t happy with this, so we experimented with Photoshop
and we finally made a new poster, which looked different to our magazine
cover but also had the same brand identity as the magazine cover and the
teaser trailer. We changed the position and size of the characters and we
overlaid a fire photo and a photo of leaves, we then changed the opacity the
make the characters viewable.
Before Feedback After Feedback

12. Conclusion
Overall we used the feedback that was given to us by our
audience, and we used it to fully transform our teaser trailer into
something that you would see in Hollywood. Having the audience
feedback has given us another ‘fresh set of eyes’ to evaluate our
work and to find improvements that was not initially seen to us
at first. We have acted on this feedback and it has made our
teaser trailer, poster and magazine cover much stronger.