Q3 Media Evaluation

1. Q3 Media Evaluation What have you learnt from audience feedback?

2. The best way to gain audience feedback was to organise a focus group. We created a questionnaire and then gathered a group of 10 students who were mostly from our target audience of 16-25 (aimed at older teenagers/young adults). We played the trailer and showed them the poster as well as the website. Each member of the group filled in the questionnaire with their opinions. Our results follow.

3. Genre So to begin we asked about genre. We asked what the focus group believed was the main genre of CONTEMPT; more than 50% answered with the genre we based it on which was a thriller. Like we have said, current thrillers do have conventions of the horror genre such as murders, blood and a main antagonist which is why two people may have thought the genre was horror. We also had elements of both crime and drama. When we asked about the music, all of the group answered that it fit the genre. This is great because it means that with CONTEMPT we have used conventional iconography to make it relatable to the thriller genre, especially with the music. The music we chose was quite dark and mysterious and would build faster as the narrative progressed throughout which is conventional for a thriller trailer.

4. Conventional Elements Looking at conventional elements we can see that most of the audience thought the idea of the protagonist being the killer was a good idea. This was our plan in challenging conventions as we wanted to be more innovative and creative. We found that cuts didn’t really make the audience jump but this was not a main point of our trailer. Our genre is thriller any way and jumps are more conventional for horrors. However we found that two people did jump during the jump cut scene which shows that this was effective in our audience reaction which was the intention for that cut, to keep them on edge. One important element was the Mise-En-Scene in our trailer to specifically match the genre. Our audience has given us a clear indication that it matches the genre as well as suiting the verisimilitude. This was important as we didn’t want to confuse our audience with the wrong suited mise-en-scene.

5. Ancillary Tasks It was important to link our ancillary tasks with ourtrailer to create the full promotional package that would give CONTEMPT a sense of identity. With the use of colour and keeping the general style throughout we have found that our audience believe the poster and website link well with the trailer. Not one person said no which means the techniques we used to achieve this have worked. Our results show that 90% of our audience would watch the film by just looking at the poster. This is a great statistic because it means that we have used images well to create that dark enigma surrounding the protagonist. The enigma created has made people think about the plot of the film. This can be linked to Barthes Enigma Code Theory where a certain aspect can create an enigma for the audience. They will ask questions and want to complete the puzzle. • We have included significant conventional elements in our website and the most favoured element by the audience seems to be the countdown. This is a success because this was something that we thought about right from the beginning as we thought it would give that extra exciting feature that would add to the whole vibe surrounding the film. So having this response shows that it was a good element to include, something that not all websites have.

6. Changes/Improvements We asked our audience if they believed there was anything we could improve on in any of our tasks. The overall outcome was quite successful as most of our audience said they wouldn't change anything and for our website everyone said that they wouldn’t change anything. This is good feedback seeing as a website isn’t a big part of the promotion for a film so not focused on as much, however we put a lot of focus on our website to make it look influential and this seems to have paid off. Some comments we received about the poster was that the light on the streetlight seemed too dim. This is a fair comment but our intention was to do this so that the focus was mainly on our protagonist. One person also said our trailer seemed a bit dark. We did add a lot of contrast and lowered the brightness to give more shadows so that we could further link it to the genre. Apart from the few elements that could easily be changed, the tasks seem to be a success due to the positive reception.

7. Final Opinion Here are the final statistics which help give the overall impression that our audience have of our promotional package for CONTEMPT. A really good statistic that we found was that all our audience would want to watch the film from looking at the promotional package. This shows us that all the effort we put into making the promotion package suited to the audience paid off. If this was industry professional then this would be a great outcome because it would mean that profit would be made from cinema tickets, etc. On our overall ratings we didn’t receive a rating below six and our most common rating for the package was nine in which five people answered with. This once again tells us that our package is not only suited for the intended audience but seems to be professionally made. Overall we have seen that our audience think our promotion package is well created, keeps to genre conventions and is suited for the audience. These are the main aims of a promotion package as the idea is to make profit from the film. We have succeeded in challenging conventions with the protagonist being the killer as well which was a risk but has obviously paid off.