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Film Research • At the very beginning, we watched a lot of horror films so that we could be part of a horror audience. We wanted to see horror from the audience’s perspective before we tried to make our own so that we could figure out what sort of things the audience likes and dislikes in a film, and what comes across as effective. • This was really helpful and we came up with a lot of ideas.
Feedback on genre • We asked a lot of people what kind of horror film they like best and psychological thrillers seemed to be the one that came up the most times. • People said that they found them more scary than fantasy type films which have things like ghosts and zombies in them. • This is because they know that these are not real, whereas the type of storylines in psychological thrillers are the sort of things that could actually happen. • Because of this, we decided that our film should be a psychological thriller.
Not enough typical horror • We were told that not many of the shots were particularly scary, and we needed some more that would really get across the genre of horror. • Our audience wasn’t really getting much of a sense that it was a trailer for a horror film. • Because of this we added the shots of Marissa lying dead at the bottom of the stairs, and Yasmina coming to the crime scene.
Too repetitive • We wanted to put a lot of shots of the Toria in our trailer because it is an important location, and it’s scary looking however we were told that we had too many shots of it and we didn’t really need that many. • We took some of them out but made some sound effects for the shots that we did have to ensure that the audience knew it was significant.
Strange sound effects • For the shots of the Marissa death, we originally left the sound on it and turned it up really loud so that you could hear the shot changing. • However we were told that it sounded really weird, and resembled the sound a dog makes whilst panting, so we took it off by muting the clips. • This is a video Hayden made to illustrate the change.
Words on the screen • We originally wanted to put some words on the screen to make it more clear what was happening in the trailer. We were inspired by the trailer for “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” • We thought this would make the plot of the film seem easier to understand, because if it looked too complicated then it would only attract a certain audience. • However we were told that it was fine the way it was; the plot was clear and adding words could possibly reduce the pace of the trailer.
Change of music • We originally used a different track for the opening of the trailer, but then we were told that it didn’t make it sound enough like a horror film. • This is the track we changed it to http://soundcloud.com/soniccenturyrecords/the-mirror • We were told that this was much better as it made it feel more scary.
Narration • We also planned to have some narration in our trailer, to make the plot clearer. • However we were told that we didn’t really need this, as it was clear enough what was going on, and because the music was so effective we didn’t want to ruin it by putting someone’s voice on top of it. • We also realised after this feedback that using one of our own voices probably wouldn’t sound very professional anyway.
Acland Burghley School • We went to Acland Burghley School and saw some other peoples work and showed our own, and got some feedback from some industry professionals as well as some other students. This is what we were told and as you can see we took it all into account when finishing off our trailer.
Feedback on our poster • This was some feedback we received on our poster from another student in our class. • Even though we appreciate feedback and took his comments into account, we decided not to follow his advice to change the green wall due to the fact that other people had said it looked good, and we thought it looked good as well.
Facebook Page • We made a Facebook page for our Film and included the trailer so people could tell us what they thought. • We got mainly good feedback, and any suggestions that people made were fairly small. For example some people had different opinions on how many full stops should come after “Knowing”, and the shakiness of the shots.
Some More Facebook Feedback • Some further feedback we got on Facebook however, wasn’t quite as positive, because they didn’t seem to understand what was going on in the trailer. • They mistakenly thought that the victim running through the woods was actually trying to save Yasmina’s character when this is not the case. Perhaps we should have made our plotline a bit clearer, but you could argue that many other people who watched our trailer seemed to understand it a bit more.
What have I learned from audience feedback? • Audience feedback really has had a huge influence on the whole of our project. • We based our choice of sub genre on what we thought the audience wanted, and made various changes throughout making the trailer, poster and webpage to make our product fit around the wants and needs of the audience. • I think we probably should have asked for some more advice as we were going along, because even though we did manage to get some really good constructive criticism which we used to make our trailer better, it still wasn’t perfect at the end. • Our product may have been more successful if we had put several drafts on facebook, rather than just the finished trailer.
