Evaluation Question 3

After spending 4-5months working on our teaser trailer, we finally finished producing it and put it on a range of websites in order to get feedback from our audience. We posted our teaser trailer on two different social networking sites Facebook and Twitter as well as the world's largest video-sharing website Youtube. Doing so was good as our teaser trailer was exposed to a wide range of people (including friends, family and others) not just in the UK but across the world. This allowed us to get enough feedback for our teaser trailer.

Ashley

As a group we discussed the possibility that some of the comments we may get from our audience may be to put us down and not be constructive criticism. We identified people that do this as 'Trolls', this is because they will pick the smallest and silliest things to negatively comment on. We therefore discussed how we should not take any negative comments made by people to bring us down to heart, but instead just use the feedback to draw conclusions on how effective our work has been as well as what we could do to improve on it if we had the chance to do it again.

From the two networking sites that we used to promote our teaser trailer, facebook was the one website that actually promoted our film very well. As most of our friends and families are also part of this social network, it was not as difficult to gather feedback for our teaser trailer. Especially keeping in mind that we were targeting an audience from ages 16 and over, this was good as our facebook accounts already had people around the ages we were already targeting.

After posting the teaser trailer onto facebook, our teaser trailer managed to get 9 likes and 3 shares. This is good as it shows our audience enjoyed our trailer and a few to an extent were they went ahead and shared it with their facebook friends, helping us to market the teaser trailer to even more people.

Most of the feedback we recieved from facebook was generally positive feedback.  As good as this was for our group we found it quite difficult to then know some of the other things we could have done better in order to improve our teaser trailer. Many people commented saying 'this is really good'. The screen shot below shows some of these comments. As most of these comments came from our friends, we particularly found it difficult to judge whether the positive comments made were genuinly true or bias. 

The one constructive criticism we got back from 2 of our viewers was about the 40-43 seconds of our teaser trailer. These viewers felt as if we could have improved the last shot by having made our actor look more distressed or scared by frowning a bit more and not just stare at the camera. One also thought that we could have had her scratch her face or pull her hair instead of staring at the camera. After thinking about this feedback we came to realise that if we were given a chance to improve our teaser trailer we would have definelty made the actress do something unusual or striking as to get the audience to have a shocked reaction.

As we also posted our Ancillary texts onto facebook we also managed to get some feedback. We did not really get as many comments about our Movie Magazine compared to The Poster. Our Movie Magazine maganed to get 2 likes, which was good for us as it showed that there were some people that liked it. The Poster however recieved 15 likes, this could however be because these 2 products were on my facebook, therefore as people know me they more likely to pay attention to the text i am in. Most of the comments we recieved commented on how much the viewers thought the poster looked good. As one of my friends was also once a media student, she actaully pointed out some of the conventions we used and wrote what they symbolised.

 Getting such feedback from one of our audiences that is familiar with media and how symbolism is used in films etc was good because it shows that just by her watching our teaser trailer and then picking our specific conventions, she understoiod that this was a teaser trailer for a horror film genre. This feedback also made us quite confident about our teaser trailer as it makes us feel as if we chose to feature the right conventions in our teaser trailer, eg the colour red and the caution sign.

Videos By Lekan Ashley & Nadine

We felt we needed more feedback on two of our products so decided to film people from our media class on their opinions of our poster and magazine cover. Retaining feedback from people in our class was  useful as they were about to use  terminology  relating to our products and give in depth feedback as they themselves have gone throught the process of creating these products.

Nadine


To promote our teaser trailer I decided to use BBM and sent the link of our trailer to all my contacts on my blackberry. I thought this was a good way of promoting our trailer as most of my friends are in the age range of our target audience so feedback from them would be more helpful. Sending through BBM also showed me that our trailer was easily accessible to view on smart phone and that it was a good idea that we chose youtube to host our video.

Most of the feedback I received was generally positive. This has shown me that our trailer met our target audiences expectations and that as a team we produced a good product that was well liked, proving our hard work had paid off.

Other feedback I received however was more useful, many people commented on the editing and the sound showing us that this is very important within the trailer and a key element to making a trailer a success. As a group we at first felt that our camera shots were not shot very well, but adding the soundtrack we saw a huge improvement in our trailer which is emphasised in our feedback.

However we did recieve some criticisms which was very helpful and what we needed. Some of our audience felt the ending of the trailer was not attention grabbing and didnt fulfill the suspense and tension we had created throughout the trailer. As a group we decided if improvements were to be made this was one of them. We also pointed out that we should have perhaps used an alternative piece of footage that we had orginally filmed for our ending which was a close up of our protagonist screaming. We decided to not use this footage as it didnt seem realistic and very typical/sterotypical to have at the end of a teaser trailer. However from the feedback ahown below we have learnt that sometimes it is best to go with our instincts and that doing the "sterotypical" thing is not always a negative as we have found it is what the audience like and our familiar with. We were very grateful for the alternative suggestions our audience gave.

Youtube.com is one of the widest used video hosting websites used today. Its popularity is so useful to film companies in this day and age as it is a quick easy and also free to promote their products. Promoting our product on youtube was a huge success we managed to receieve 450 views in total and views are continuously going up. Youtube is accessed worldwide, so our video was availiable to anyone anywhere, our video being accessed worldwide was abit daunting and scary as it meant anyone could comment and be free to make any comments they liked good or bad. All in all we had a positive experience using youtube we managed to receieve 11 likes and 1 dislike showing that generally people liked the video. We also managed to receieve 1 comment from a stranger which was positive shown below



The images at the side illustrate the demographics of our trailer. Our trailer seemed to attract more females than males which we found a little bit surprising. However this could be because we have a female protagonist and our trailer centres around hair which is important to females, making the trailer more relateable to them. Our video has also shown to grab the most attention from 13-24 year olds, a young audience which we intended to have. This has shown us that we have a storyline that is appealing to a younger audience, however the demographics have shown that older people have also found our video appealing creating our trailer to be one that is appealing to all which is a good factor for a movie to have as it could ensure high revenue.

The picture below us has taught us the hardwork of being an independent film company as its not always easy to promote a film to a global audience. The youtube statistics have shown that our film would be one that would appeal to a UK audience only with only few other mainly European countries viewing our trailer. Perhaps with more promotion we would be able to reach a European aswell as a UK audience. 

Traffic source is the various ways in which our viewers found our video. This has taught us that their our loads of ways in which audiences can get a hold of our product and that media convergence is an important factor when trying to reach out to audiences as shown through the statistics.