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What have you learned from your target audience?

+Target Audience

During my research and planning sections, I spent time analysing genre specific STA’s and looked at their codes and conventions so that I learnt more about my own target audience and the ways in which I could appeal to them. This knowledge was developed when I directly contacted my target audience via a questionnaire and interview. All of these activities were pivotal to the creation of my trailer so that it was suitable and enjoyable for those who it was aimed at.

+Questionnaire

Out questionnaire was a more basic level of research but we used it to ask opinions about some of the fundamental narrative, layout and design features. The questions were simple but clear with multiple choice answers, and our results from this test generally confirmed our previous views about what our target audience would want or expect.

+Questionnaire

My analysis of the questionnaire helped me to interpret the results. We received slightly unexpected outcomes from our question about the dominant themes as most of our target audience wanted violence to be the central theme of the trailer. In our opinion, we thought that although violence can make scenes more interesting and dramatic it doesn’t contain enough substance for it to be the main feature of our plot so in this instance we didn’t directly follow our target audience’s advice. However, we decided to incorporate more violence into our trailer so that it would appear more favourably to our viewers. I created a very fast montage near the end of our trailer which focused on lots of the aggressive and emotional scenes which we had filmed. I deliberately chose very brief moments from these scenes and used the blade tool to cut them down further. By playing these quick shots in sequence, it was slightly disorientating and really emphasised the aggressive and violent themes within the film.

+Turning point

The questionnaire described how our audience thought a turning point was best created through a change in multiple media elements; including music, editing and lighting. We agreed with this and revoked our initial decision to have just one piece of backing music and decided to insert another faster song during out turning point. Interestingly we chose backing songs from well-known artists because my codes and conventions research revealed that films from the teenage genre often did this to engage their young audiences. The editing used throughout was developed during the turning point in time with the music since this is what our audience felt would be most appropriate. We replayed the exact moment when she took drugs for the first time and added a red filter rather than blue to the replay.

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Generally our questionnaire results adhered to our own ideas about using multiple locations, having a female protagonist and showing the narrative from the protagonist’s perspective. Additionally, we decided to conduct an interview with a small focus group so we were able to receive more specific and detailed feedback; looking back now this was an essential part in the development of our trailers structure and narrative.

+Interview

One of the students suggested it was a good idea to show the protagonist clearly in the beginning of the trailer but this contrasted to our opening footage that had quick shots of our two lead characters consuming alcohol and taking drugs (this was initially going to be a flash forward). However because we were in an interview she mentioned the reasoning behind her idea was so that “you could build a viewer and character relationship” after understanding the logic behind our target audiences comment we were much more inclined to follow her advice and immediately started the trailer with 3 mid shots of our protagonist. The other member of our focus group made a significant remark in terms of the narrative of our piece. She suggested that our narrative be unchronological to reflect how the protagonist is feeling. “If she wants to get revenge on her boyfriend then she’ll be stuck in the past a lot” this was a really thoughtful comment and showed she clearly though about our narrative. It gave me a different perspective on the way we structured our trailer and it taught me to consider things from a more conceptual basis. As a direct result from this feedback we added in flash-forwards and flashbacks particularly in our final montage that combines the ending of our piece with flashbacks to all the important moments in their relationship.

+Feedback

We continued receiving target audience feedback during the production of our trailer during our showcase. Once we had completed an initial draft we showed it to a large group of 16 - 17 year old students and asked them to complete a feedback sheet asking their thoughts on it. Their age was important since the themes and content in our trailer was intended for people of their maturity.

Please look below the presentation to listen to some of our audience

feedback.

+ A lot of the feedback we received was quite

similar and slightly basic. After organising our feedback, we learnt that our two main areas of improvement were the initial voiceover and general sound. As a group we specifically looked at the sound graphs of particular dialogue scenes such as our footage in the common room where ‘Danielle’can be heard perfectly but Sarah’s response was barely audible. We had to target individual sections of the dialogue and increase the volume. Through this technique we improved all of the general sound and we learnt how to increase the volume of a particular word i.e. when Kyle calls Sarah ‘disgusting’ and this was all as a result of our feedback. After the audience struggled to hear and understand the beginning of the trailer, I re-recorded our opening voiceover and changed the words so that it was from a first person perspective. I wanted everything to be clear concise and normal to reflect the films initial equilibrium so I removed the echo and two tone effects leaving just the bare voice.

+Finally..

We also used the voice over to make the narrative clearer as after we had a short peer assessment session we discovered people found it difficult to follow our storyline and in particular the correlation between her real metal illness and her drug addiction. To solve this issue we re-worked the begging of our trailer so it showed three clear mid shots all edited together that showed her taking her medication on multiple days. This occurred at the same time of voiceover describing her illness making it clear she has a diagnosed problem. We reduced confusion by adding a heavy blur affect to specific flashbacks so it’s clear what they were. Our Target Audience has definitely influenced the creation of our trailer since we tried to follow most of the advice they gave us, we learnt from the advice they gave and the different perspectives they offered.