What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Whilst creating our horror trailer, we tried to make it look as professional as possible. We were always thinking about the audience and what they would like instead of what we would like. Once we thought our trailer was good enough, we decided to add a good font and decided that our trailer was finished. For most horror movies, the main target audience is for young teenage males. We didn't just want our trailer to be aimed at young teenage males. There are many girls who are more willing to watch horror films nowadays so we made sure that we didn't directly aim our film just at teenage males but also at teenage females. To gather feedback for our trailer, everyone in our class had to show their trailer to the rest of class and after a viewing of their trailer, each person would say what they thought was good and what they thought they needed to improve. From our feedback, I learnt a few things...

This was our feedback:

What needs to be improved:

Music needs to speed up / be more pacey

When we were putting together the music for our trailer, we wanted the music to fit well with the trailer itself. I think that some people made this comment because there were quick handheld shots which didn't have fast enough music for that particular clip which ruined the climax of the trailer. We also tried to make our music slowly build up. I think we achieved this however I think that some parts needed to be faster. We changed this by adding in a few more drum tracks and more tense background music.

Overall trailer slow

When we went out filming to get footage for our trailer, we shot as much as we could so we were not short of clips when we got to the editing process. When we were editing the trailer, I think that we put too much footage in our trailer and the trailer ended up being 1min45. Most full length trailers are only 1min - 1min30. So we made our trailer a little shorter making the trailer feel much faster.

Lots of build up but not much happened

When we were editing and filming our trailer, we wanted something to happen at the end like a girl scream or something to make the audience jump. We never ended up doing this however we added a shot of us at the end walking towards the church where all the action of the trailer just happened. We wanted to create the tense effect of "I wouldn't do that if I were you". And the clip just faded out. The way we improved this will be mentioned in "Ditch long walking shot".

Too much cutting

Some people said we had too much cutting within our trailer however we thought that lots of action and cutting was a trailer convention, keeping the audience of the edge of their seats. When we came back to make improvements to our trailer we moved a few clips around to make the trailer flow a little better.

More Monk shots later

We had quite a few shots of the Monk because we didn't want our trailer to lack the main 'monster' of the film. We added quite a few shots of the Monk throughout the trailer to surprise the audience. Some people felt that we should have moved more shots of the Monk towards the end. We did this we weere rearranging the order of our trailer.

Quality of light / saturation change

Lots of our footage was taking during the day and a minority of it was taken at night. We knew we could take advantage of the "day to night" effect in Final Cut Pro so we were not worried about our overall effect. Some of the clips were we added "day to night" became too surreal and the colour was too bright and vibrant. We spent some time on editing our "day to night" clips so they looked as realistic as possible.

Ditch long walking shot

Many people said that we should have ditched the long walking shot at the end of our trailer because it dragged on for too long and it completely lost the audience. We had to re-think on what we had to do and we decided to move a few clips around. Because not much happened at the end of our trailer, we decided to put our strongest clip of the Monk at the end and we put the walking shot near the beginning of the trailer and made it much shorter. We didn't want to ditch the shot because we thought it was a good establishing shot showing where the characters were going.

Maybe have a voice over

One thing we thought about when we were planning our trailer was to have a voice over/dialouge throughout the trailer. During the filming process, we came to a decision that it was a good idea to keep the trailer free from dialouge as we thought it would have been cliché.

More intertitles about the Monk

When researching horror trailers we realised all trailers have intertitles to briefly explain the plot of the story. We did this by explaining how three friends ended up to come across this violent ghost Monk. We never actually said much about the Monk and how it ended up for him to come back to life. In the end, we never added any titles about the Monk because we wanted to keep the Monk in complete mystery as this would want the audience to see the film.

Slightly more dramatic

As we already got all our clips we wanted, we thought it would have been difficult to make our trailer more dramatic without shooting again. So to make our trailer more dramatic without shooting we edited our soundtrack as much as possible to give a more dramatic effect. As we moved around a lot of clips and the soundtrack didn't fit anymore, we had to edit anyway. We added more dramatic drums and more bellowing bass tones to make our trailer much more tense.


Good points:
Well edited
Music fits well with trailer
Running shots looked realistic
Camera angles of Monk were good
Locations were realistic

From this feedback I was able to realise the things that didn't work within our trailer. Without this feedback, we wouldn't have been able to see the different things that didn't work and the overall product wouldn't have been very good. The audience feedback made us change our trailer so it was much better. We mainly changed the order of our trailer because we realised our "walking shot" did not work at the end. We also improved the saturation in some of our "day to night" shots because some of them looked unrealistic. With these changes and a few minor improvements, I think that we made a better trailer just from audience feedback.