2. Why does the film industry spend so much
time and money test screening films to
invited audiences or finding out what
audiences like through market research?
The film industry spends a lot of money on market
research because once they have found out the
audiences opinions they can see what is popular
among their audiences and change their film to make
it more appealing to a certain audience. If they
change the film people are more likely to go and see
the film which means they make more money in the
long term. The film industry can also find out the
most effective way to advertise their film once they
know what kind of audience enjoys their film. If your
film appeals to mainly teenagers, you will know that
social media is the best way to spread the word about
your film.
3. Who are your audience?
To find out our target audience we did many different
types of research, we found out that our audience are
mainly females aged 15-25.
To find this out we went onto the Pearl and Dean website
and searched for the film Annabelle. Once we had found
research on the film ‘Annabelle’ we were able to see the
percentage of the ages, gender and class of the audiences
that went to see ‘Annabelle’. We found out that 46% of
people that saw ‘Annabelle’ were male and 54% were
female. This is because the doll is the antagonist of the
movie, making it slightly more appealing to females.
We also made a closed question questionnaire, with
multiple choice questions, asking questions about the
person age and gender and which aspects of horror movies
people prefer. For example we asked what their favourite
kind of protagonist and antagonist and where there
favourite horror movie setting is. We handed this out to our
class mates and a few people around college to get strong
varied feedback.
5. At what stages did you ask your audience
questions or get their feedback?
We handed out questionnaire's
whilst we were still planning our idea
so that we knew what kind of horror
film would appeal to the people our
age. The questionnaire worked well
as we got a variation of different
answers and as our questionnaire
had multiple choice questions we
could tally up the scores and see
what was the most popular answer
for each question.
7. How did you get this feedback?
What methods did you use and why?
We had two screenings of our film, which we
showed to the other members of our class, to see
what they did and didn’t like about our teaser
trailer.
In the first screening, as we had only just started
editing our trailer, we only got basic information
about the clips we were using and whether they
were appropriate or not to our films story and
genre.
In the second clip, however, as we had finished
our first draft of our teaser trailer, we got a lot
more feedback and information about what was
right and wrong with our teaser trailer. We got
feedback about our sound choice, our editing,
titles, whether it fitted the genre, what is good
about it and what is bad about it.
8. We used an open and closed questionnaire asking about
each section of our teaser trailer such as mise en scene,
camera work, editing and genre. We put options above
each question with four boxes so that the viewers could tick
whether the aspect they are being asked about is very
strong, strong, ok or poor. We then added a section to the
question where they could put additional comments to tell
us how we can improve.
During the second screening we also found out a major
flaw with our teaser trailer and it was that people were
unsure of who Maddie’s character was and what role she
plays. We were able to use our feedback to improve this
and edit our trailer further to show who her character is,
the evil doll.
We did have some strong feedback from our second
screening, a lot of people said that we portrayed the genre
well through the use of sound such as the screaming and
the baby crying. We were also credited for our mise en
scene such as the setting, costume, like Maddie's (the
doll’s) make up and our editing.
Our audience also said that to improve we needed to add
more shots explaining the doll’s where abouts as it wasn’t
clear how she was getting around in each shot. They also
said our titles did not look professional enough.
9. How did you use this feedback? Was it
useful? Did you make any changes to
your work because of it?We took on board all the negative feedback we were
given from the screening and we made changes
according to what the viewers had said we could
improve on.
For example, because a lot of people were saying we
needed more shots of Maddie and who her character
is/ how her character is getting around in each shot,
we went and filmed a few more shots that we could
edit into our trailer.
They also criticised our titles and said that they were
not professional enough in the way they look and how
they transition on screen. We therefore went onto the
mac computer we were editing out teaser trailer on
and looked at different fonts on dafont.com, edited the
colour of our titles and looked on Final Cut Pro to find
appropriate transitions.
10. How did you use this feedback? Was it
useful? Did you make any changes to
your work because of it?We took on board all the negative feedback we were
given from the screening and we made changes
according to what the viewers had said we could
improve on.
For example, because a lot of people were saying we
needed more shots of Maddie and who her character
is/ how her character is getting around in each shot,
we went and filmed a few more shots that we could
edit into our trailer.
They also criticised our titles and said that they were
not professional enough in the way they look and how
they transition on screen. We therefore went onto the
mac computer we were editing out teaser trailer on
and looked at different fonts on dafont.com, edited the
colour of our titles and looked on Final Cut Pro to find
appropriate transitions.