Evaluation 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation 3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?


From carrying out our audience questionnaires I gained some knowledge about the views of our demographic audience, which ultimately are the most important thing when promoting a film. By knowing what the audience thinks we can construct our product to meet some of their expectations, from our first audience feedback questionnaire we found what they would want from the film promotions and we took this into account when constructing our poster, trailer and magazine cover. The second audience feedback found their opinions on our actual product and therefore we can analyse them and find whether we have done this project successfully.


In both questionnaires we gave them to an equal amount of males and females in order to gain representative results of both genders. In relation to reception theory, peoples identities e.g. their gender, affect how they interpret texts, therefore by asking both genders equally we can gain an idea of their views of our project, and also compare how differently both genders answered. 
From the first questionnaire we learnt that half of our respondents wanted a fast pace trailer which is exactly what we did. We took this into consideration and made of trailer a fast pace because it is conventional of thrillers and the audience would expect this. 


We also found that the theory of the two step flow may apply as in our first audience feedback we found that nearly a quarter of respondents find out about new films through the friends. If they watch the trailer, they may not take in the information directly but it may be reinforced through opinion leaders. In relation to this, in terms of our product, audience theory - the hypodermic needle model may not be applicable. From our questionnaire we found that the audience did not directly take in the information that was given. If they had then every question would have had the appropriate answer that we wanted. An example of this is the genre, a quarter said they thought it was a horror, if they had been subject to the hypodermic needle model then they wouldn't have questioned this genre. 


In the Audience Feedback questionnaire on opinions about our products, we found that they can be easily confused with horror films because of how closely linked they are. A quarter of our respondents did in fact think that our film trailer, poster and magazine cover represented a horror film. This is understandable as they are very similar in terms of themes and lighting. However from this, I've learnt that next time, if ever we were to amend or change our work, we could ensure that the thriller genre really comes across clearly possibly by adding less of the very dark aspects 
which convey horror also, then hopefully 100% of respondents would know it was a thriller film.


From our open ended question, we found that for a theatrical trailer, it may be to short however the general consensus from our respondents is that it is perfect for television trailers; they can never be to long as there is a specific time schedule along with many people not wanting to sit through a 2.30 minute trailer in the adverts. 


In terms of reception theory, our audience have answered the questions in the questionnaire in a way that relates to their identity. Reception theory is a development of an active audience, it is claimed that an audience interpret and receive a text in different ways dependent on the circumstances for example, their age, gender, social class, ethnicity etc. Our film is a 15 so in terms of age, films that may be a 12 or PG may be accepted passively, however as we can see from our audience feedback, all our respondents are 15 or over and therefore challenge our product, which also challenged the hypodermic needle model.