3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback was a very important and helpful tool because it allowed us to:

• Improve our teaser trailer and print production titles.
• Discover how our media product relates t our target audience.
• Identify if our product has the intended effect upon our target audience.

There were two types of audience feedback that we used these were formal and informal. For formal we used a questionnaire with quantitative and qualitative. Informal was more feedback that we got as we went along from our teacher and peers. Whilst we can easily quote the formal feedback we did not record our informal feedback.

The earliest formal feedback was a questionnaire that we handed out to five different people in our target audience and asked them to comment on our rough cut. As I said before we included qualitative and quantitative questions so that we had a combination of stats and opinions. These stats helped us to realise trends in filmgoers. We also realised that the ending to our trailer needed a lot of work because the tension levels were only rated on average at 5. Also people said that they were not interested in our film this worried us.

below is the feedback sheets we received for our rough cut.
Audience Feedback Rough Cut


We also included a constructive criticism question to see where we were going wrong and a lot of people wrote that the scare at the end was too obvious and no tension was created. We knew that we needed to change the ending because of this so we re-filmed it and re edited it. We also included some more scary music from a copyright free CD.

These improvements were reflected when we showed the final cut to ten people and had them fill out the same questionnaire. We got much better feedback with the tension levels much higher and a lot less constructive criticism. We also saw a marked improvement in interest in the film as nearly everyone wanted to see the film apart form someone who did not watch horror films anyway. We also saw that we were appealing to audience expectations from the answers given to the questions. For example ‘How did you feel after watching the trailer?’ “Uncomfortable and wanting to know the whole story.” – Sam Avery

below is the feedback forms we got for the final cut.
Audience Feedback Final Cut

We also asked some people to fill out questionnaires for our ancillary tasks and we received positive feedback on both our poster and magazine cover. We got answers such as “The poster looks professional and as a horror fan I would posses interest in the production if it were real.” However most of the feedback we received was informal form peers and such who saw it during the production process and helped us to steer it in the right direction.

As a group we realise that audience feedback is essential especially if you are making a product, which needs to appeal to a specific target audience. It helped us to improve all three of our products.