Q3: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

 The Importance of  Audience Feedback:

Audience feedback is essentially crucial in allowing me to target my audience successfully. The feedback that I gain helps me to look back and analyse my promotional package, so that I may have time to make changes as soon as possible after listening to my target audience. Below are the feedback that I had gained from my target audience.:

POSTER:

When asking students in my college what they thought of my horror poster this was the feedback that I had received:  

'The poster looks really professional and would stand out on billboards' 

' The blue door doesn't fit to the horror conventions, but it makes the tag-line 'time to repent' stand out' 

'I love the fact that the smashed windows look as though there eyes and it's staring right at you .. It defiantly scares me' 

' The use of the gold cross in 'SIN' has been cleverly used as you would associate the word 'SIN' with evil things' 

'The poster looks really mysterious and it would make me go to watch the film' 

The comments above were overall great and showed me that I was fitting most of the conventions horror. There were some feedback my target audience gave me to make changes such as the color of the door in the poster. One of the changes to make were that a member of the audience thought that the 'blue door does not fit the horror conventions'. I then went back on Photoshop to edit the door and add the conventional color black. As you can see below I manipulated the color of the door and made it look slightly more sinister. After doing this, I then went back to my target audience and asked them if they now preferred this style to the other poster. Their opinions had changed and they thought that there was 'too much black on the poster, you couldn't see the tagline well, and it didn't fit well with the whole style of the poster'. 

This showed me the importance of feedback from my target audience as I had changed to make improvements and could see if there was a good outcome in keeping the changes or if my original poster was more effective to fit the horror conventions. 

MOVIE MAGAZINE:

When asking students for their views and opinions on my movie magazine, this is what the target audience had said: 

'The magazine looks really professional'

'I love the fact that you can't see the killers face, it makes it more mysterious' 

' The colors suit together and fit the horror conventions' 

'You used the classical black and red to show the genre of the magazine' 

'I think you could have added more pictures on the front cover to make it more interesting' 

The feedback that I  had received showed me that I had met most of the conventions of a horror magazines like other professional magazines.

There was some great comments overall for the horror magazine, however if I was to make improvements I would of tried to add more pictures on the front cover to see if it looked better and then see what the target audience thought. Here are some horror magazine that have more than one picture on their front cover. I could of styled out my magazine to a similar layout to these: 

POSTING MY HORROR MAGAZINE AND POSTER ON SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES:

I then posted my horror poster and movie magazine on social networking sites to get the general public's opinion and feedback. This is again important as my horror poster will be able to reach a wide range of audience and give me a variety of feedback. I used the two most powerful and popular social sites:

TWITTER FEEDBACK: (change to horror poster) 

Once I uploaded my movie poster on 'Twitter' these were the comments that I had received online: 

'I thought it was a real horror poster, its really good' 

'I like how it's different to other horror magazine as you haven't used the conventional black and red throughout the whole poster' 

'The use of the blue door is quite different, I wouldn't of used that color though' 

As you can see, I had received a comment about the color of the door used again. This clearly showed me that the it does not wholly fit the conventions of a horror poster. However, as we are so used to seeing dark colors throughout horror posters used it may catch audiences attention as it's something that they have not seen before. One member of the audience thought that the color of the door was 'effective in capturing the audiences attention as the tagline stands out'. This was a positive comment on the color of the door and made me look at it in a different perspective. 

Uploading my poster on Facebook:

                                                         

The above image shows me trying to get audience feedback from the public for my movie magazine and movie poster. 

Uploading my magazine on Facebook:

After uploading my movie magazine I received comments such as

VIDEO FEEDBACK:
Here is a video of the feedback that I received from the members of my target audience:


TRAILER:

I had also used 'YouTube' to promote my horror trailer. YouTube acts as an important factor to promoting my horror trailer as its free and allows people to globally give me feedback on the trailer. The pictures below show how many people have viewed the trailer and the comments that I had received from audiences.

YOUTUBE:

The above images shows the number of views increasing over time. This shows that YouTube is a successful software in allowing our trailer to be aired all over the world for our target audience to watch and provide feedback. 

The picture below shows when the audience were viewing our trailer and how frequent. As you can see 2 people have made our trailer one of their favorite video's which shows that our trailer is beginning to become quite successful. 

This picture below shows were the audience are viewing our trailer. As you can see our horror trailer is being watched world-wide from the UK to South America. 

  

Overall, I feel that our audience feedback has been successful. The most significant thing that we have learnt throughout the audience feedback is the changes to meet and if I had met the horror conventions correctly. Collecting audience feedback is crucial as it shows us if we have met the target audiences needs within our horror trailer. This brings in the 'Audience gratification' theory in where we explore why audiences watch particular media texts and what they get from the media text, for example the thrill of being scared from watching a horror film. Media Institutions collect audience feedback through test screening in where audiences go and watch the film before it has been released to see if it meets their needs as an audience. After they will provide feedback on what they liked/enjoyed and the improvements, this then gives the film institutions a chance to adjust parts of the film, for example if the target audience did not like the ending they will then change the ending to meet their needs and gratification. This is why audience feedback is a significant part within the making and releasing of films.