The target demographic for the majority of horror films is young males between 13-27. There is also a small demographic of young couples that go to see horror films meaning that young females can also fit into this. As my class is full of 17-18 year old males predominantley, with one or two females, gaining feedback from them will give me and my group appropriate opinions about the trailer.
During the screening of our teaser trailer we received comments from every member of the class about what worked well and what didn't. The feedback from the audience which, as teenagers, were in the target demographic for horror films was very helpful to me and my group as we were able to change appropriate things to change in the trailer. This screening helped us finalise the trailer to make it as good as it can be without any major re-filming.
There weren't many issues pointed our in the trailers 'first draft' as we did our best to iron out all of the problems objectively and ignore the amount of effort we put in, if the result wasn't what we were trying to achieve. We were impressed with the lack of negative comments about major parts of our trailers as they were mainly about aspects that we could easily edit without re-shooting. Mixed opinions about two main things were cropping up in the class; the inter-titles & the audio.
Effectively, the main opinions that were coming up about the inter-titles were that they either looked professional, or that they looked too 'Sci-Fi' for a horror trailer. After we realised the opinions were mixed we carried out a quick poll to find out whether we should keep them, or change them.
The results we obtained made our mind up that we should keep the titles in the trailer because the majority of reviews were very positive. All the negative opinions about them were only mild opinions and no one had an overly strong negative opinion. However, we didn't just ignore the opinion that the inter-titles had an overly 'science fiction' feeling and we took time to dull down the effects that were placed on them.
Another negative point that kept occurring after the screening was based on the recorded audio in the soundtrack as we placed whispers on the inter-titles. These were deemed to be cheesy and even brought a few members of the class to laughter. It was due to this that we removed them whispers and instead recorded audio during one of the scenes which gave us an opportunity to explain the narrative a bit more than previously. However, although this was a negative opinion we did receive some comments about how to explore the basic idea of having whispers. One of them was to add a 'wall' of whispers during one of the scenes to act like a crescendo as the main protagonist approached the 'evil' to ultimately lead to the low key shot of the evil's face.
The other main negative was that the colouring on our trailer involved a bit too much green which is a signifier of the sci-fi genre and not so much of horror. Some members in the class also said that red would of been a more appropriate colour but we, however, strongly disagreed. We thought that adhering to the conventions of horror so strongly would've affected the originality of our trailer so we stuck to the original colour scheme. The green colouring was chosen originally to to try and represent a supernatural being within the location and this was key to give the location them connotations.
We also got some very detailed specific ideas about how we should edit the trailer as well, my favourite idea being that we should only place the green filters on the visuals when inside the building. This would give connotations about the whole building being a supernatural location rather than just the 'necklace' being an object of supernatural essence.
On the whole though, i believe the screening taught us a lot, especially about how difficult it is to objectively create a product that suits the target demographic even with the basic codes and conventions that we should adhere to. For example, I believe that if we did not carry out a screening we would've maintained the whispers throughout the trailer because we originally liked the sound when combined with the title. But getting the perspective of other people caused us to take notice of the sound and actually realise the flaw of having non-diagetic sound simply repeat what is happening visually.
This is okay but a bit brief. Begin by explaining who your target audience is and how you gathered your feedback. This will justify why you got most of it from your classmates-after all they are part of your target audience. Did you get any feedback from any other sources such as Facebook or screenings to friends? Otherwise I think I'd just like you to explain your points a little more thoroughly. A few more images to show what you're talking about would be useful too.
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