Audience Feedback

After holding a private screening for our film trailer where we invited our chosen target audience to receive feedback from them. We created a questionnaire that they could fill out to show us clearly the feedback we wanted to receive and help us to clean up our trailer after the first cut.

We received a wide range of different answers from our questionnaire. There was positive comments about how the audience saw that the genre was clear for people to interpret as they watched it. Here are some of the questionnaires.

Social Media

For our film trailer we wanted to be able to promote throughout the filming, editing and production process so we made a twitter for our film trailer.

Trailer Target Audience Research

Website Target Audience Research

Poster Target Audience Research

Crime Target Audience Research

Barthes

After our research into narrative theory we found that Barthes theory was the one we felt best fitted to our trailer's narrative, therefore causing us to research further into Barthes work and theory.

Hermeneutic Code: elements of the story are not fully explained, this creates a mystery or enigma, keeping the audience guessing and to encourage them to view the trailer, as they are left with unanswered questions.

Proairetic Code: builds narrative tension, relates to something else that will happen, unknown, audience are kept guessing.

Barthes considers three other codes (semantic, symbolic and cultural), however these are less directly relevant to theory applied to our trailer.

Both of these codes work in relation to each other to develop tension in a narrative. We felt this theory was best to apply to our trailer as, by their nature, trailer's do not tell the audience everything, henceforth leaving mystery and enigma. This is something we can develop within our trailer, incorporating to our advantage as mystery is a key element and convention of the crime genre.

Examples of shots creating an enigma/mystery:

Question screens

Variation of questions makes the audience think, puts them in character's position

Drug use

Who is taking drugs?

Why?

Running shots

Where are they going?

Why are they running?

Who are they running from?

What are they running from?

Are they in trouble?

Why are they in trouble?

Money

Who's money is it?

Why is it on the train?

Will they keep it?

Where is the owner?

Will they report it to the police?

Will they work together?

Audience Research: Plot

We sent out a survey to all of Year 11, 12 and 13 asking them what they would do if they found £100,000 in their bank account. These were the results we found:

To make our film more interesting we will challenge the ideas of  the audience. We will also do some research into how people would spend £100,000 to give us a broader idea of the realistic options of what people of a similar age to our characters would do with the money.

Audience Expectations of Crime Genre

By carrying out primary and secondary research I was able to see what things our target audience would expect of the crime genre.

A lot of the things that the audience would expect to see from the crime genre are things that we will be able to include in our trailer, however due to the plot of our trailer, filming restrictions and time constrictions of the trailer length, we will not be able to include all of these.

Looking back at my AS coursework, I found this post showing the conventions of a crime film and the things you would usually see. In comparison to what I have found from the audience research, to a degree what the audience would expect to see and what the below mind map shows, is similar. However, the below mind map is more specialized into a certain aspect of the crime genre such as camera shots, character and mise-en-scene.

From this we have decided we are going to include a villain who is mysterious and whose identity remains unknown within the trailer. We have also decided that our 'victims' will be everyday people, we have also decided to have three main protagonists who are the 'victim' characters, to provide a variety of character roles. Something else we have chosen to use based on the audiences expectations is tracking shots, including some CCTV shots (as shown in our test shots post). The sounds of screams and gunshots will be used within the trailer to create the effective of the crime genre, some of this will be sound recorded during filming, whereas other sounds will be added in post-production. Sound is something we have already experimented with in our Foley sound experiments, allowing us to see how best to record the sounds we need.