What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

In class our trailer was shown in order to gain some audience feedback. This was quite useful as it helped me understand the trailer from a different perspective. There have been of postive and negative points which have helped me understand the effect our trailer has had on the target audience. There were many positive aspects, many of which succumb to the typical conventions of the horror genre. We found out that the use of ECU's contributed to the audience identifaction with the protagonist; which is used frequently in contempory horror movies. This includes the use of the slow motion blur at the beginning  of our trailer where we see the protagonist waking up and coming round after her operation. The audeience liked the lighting contrast we used, as the trailer progresses from high key lighting to low key lighting. This relates to the structure we've used as we based the trailer on Todrov's theory of the equilibrium leading to the disequilibrium, this applies to the standard convention of a horror teaser trailer. We learnt that this structure was effective, as the pace of shots builds up throughout the trailer. Also the use of gore (such as the hand shots) had a positive effect, due to it's immediate connotations with the horror genre. The soundtrack is one of the main aspects which helped our trailer to form the structure we wanted. We found that the audience thought it was effective how we built up the music throughout the trailer without reaching the cresendo. In particular the audience liked how the music completely cut off before the end shot, as it made the them jump; which was our aim. The favourite sequence in our trailer is the part when we see in the protagonists mind, as we dissolved the characters scared face with the horrible images she's seeing.

In relation to the negative aspects there are a few things which they advised we improved. On our first inter-title we had a "boom" sound effect which they felt contradicted the text. During the trailer their's a heart monitor sound as the proganonist is in a wheel chair which the audience felt ruined the effect of the same sound effect at the end. We also found out that at times the soundtrack didn't quite match the editing pace as it needed to be faster. Although we did establish the narrative our audience decided that we needed to tie the child into the narrative more; due to his character never quite being established. We also found that we had the same problem with the narrative and other shots in general; as sometimes the audience didn't understand the relation between the two.

After gaining audience feedback I feel that we could improve it in several ways. It would have been more effective to change to soundtrack to something which matched the pace of the trailer itself, this way we would have attracted the audience's attention more. The fact that the two don't match that much draws the audiences attention way from the action and makes the horror less effective than it could have been. Also we could have added a few more shots to illustrate the narrative. The plot isn't that obvious and although we done this to levae the audience with a sense of mystery some more dialogue might have contributed to the storyline. Some of the audience didn't really understand what our film was about, which in turn could make them less likely to view the film. We needed to establish the narrative more in order to give it a unique selling point.