3. What have you learn from your audience feedback?

We arranged a viewing for about 20 students and let them watch our product and talk about their views on it. We did this to learn more about how our text positions and moves an audience how well it does that. I think direct audience feedback can be vital to improving a product as it lets your target audience tell you exactly what they want, and this can result in your product being much more effective.
The product was shown once to the audience and then specific parts that the audience had commented on were shown again. The time when the viewing was done, it was still in its first cut stages with further audio and visual editing to be done to become most effective. Audience feedback was highly positive about the use of depth of field and the camera shot usage. Some of the audience found the first cut hard to identify with since there was no clear protagonist being portrayed apart from the assumption of a ‘final girl’. This was down to it being the first cut and audience/character identification points had not been completely clarified. This has now been rectified.
Most of the positive feedback focused on how our text followed a lot of the ideas and was slightly iconic to the horror or more specially the slasher genre. We achieved this by looking at various films of that genre throughout the decades. These were films such as: The shining, Halloween, The hills have eyes, Wilderness, Eden Lake, Friday the 13th, Blair witch project and 28 days later. These particular films stood out in terms of their huge popularity and unique styles within the horror genre.
A technique used similarly among all of them was trying to make the victims emotions seem more real and more intense, usually being helped by specific camera techniques. We tried to implement this by using a lot of handheld footage with lots of high and low angles, one member went as far as climbing a tree to obtain these angles. When these techniques were mentioned with the audience, they commented how it worked together to give the impression of being watch and lost. Focus was another point the audience discussed; they liked how we used depth of field on obstructing objects (trees, bushes etc) to enhance the feeling of being watched. Most of the audience also liked the nods to the slasher genre.
The places with room for improvement was mostly audience/character identification, which we believe has now been achieved through the use of voiceovers and dialogue to make it easier for the audience to identify. Another common critical comment was of the soundtrack, which at some places did not match the visuals tempo-wise. Overall this text could defiantly be made more effective through incorporating these suggestions into the next editing session.
There was quite a few comments about the horror genre, it was pointed out a few times and commented on codes we had used to actively represent the genre. Some of the codes were used where: sounds such as crows in the background that add an eerie feel and has become almost cliché in some types of horror films. Some of the other codes we put into the trailer to link it to the genre were: lighting, depth of field, extreme close ups, canted angle shots, light and dark mise en scene and keeping the killer mostly shroud in darkness.