Evaluation: Question 3

COLOUR CODE:
Fenetta - Pink
Lucy - Yellow
Lauren - Blue
Ben - Green

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

As our poster is not possible to be shown on YouTube, I had to think of alternative ways of getting feedback from it and figured that Facebook would be a good outlet for feedback, so I posted the poster on there.

I found out that although people are trying to be as honest as possible, using Facebook as a feedback outlet is bias as most of the people on your Facebook are your friends and family that won’t try and hurt your feelings if they think your work is bad, so I printed out our poster and showed people around college and outside college if they would go and watch the movie and I wrote down what people said. The general reception of the movie poster was good and people mostly liked the colour scheme and the fact that you can’t see the characters face.

The general comments included that the poster was dark and scary enough to make them want to watch it and that the poster doesn’t give away enough, hence the audience not knowing what it’s about and making them want to watch it even more.

I stopped a girl at Trafalgar square called Haley and asked her what she thought about the poster, and she said “It’s very dark and gloomy, so I would watch it, but I’m not too sure what’s going on in it, so that makes me want to watch it more”

I also asked another member of the general public, a man called Keith and he said “I don’t really like horror movies, but this poster is good. A bit too good to made by college students and I would recommend my friends that are into horror movies to watch it”

I thought that it was a good criticism, especially from someone that doesn’t like horror movies, you would think that they would bash the genre all together, but he didn’t and commended us on our work.
A lot of people commented on the title of poster saying that we had spelt “Lullaby” wrong and that it doesn’t have an “E” on the end.

I explained to them that the effectiveness of this is that we made the font two different colours, one half of the LULLABYE work black, and the end half red as to say “Bye” to indicate death. The people that I told understood it immediately and thought that it was a good idea, but were scared that they didn’t notice it initially, again, enforcing a sense of fear in them, which is what we were going for.

I stopped one guy and asked him what he thought and apparently, he was a budding and young film maker and he gave us a lot of things he thought was right and wrong about our poster. He said: “We are supposed to believe that she’s lived in a closet all of her life, but she looks well fed and she doesn’t look dirty. You should have made her look unbelievably dirty. And who bonded her hands behind her?” At that point, I came up with the answer to his question and told him that it’s a bit of suspense and that if he were to watch the film, the secret of her arms being bound behind her would be revealed.

He also told us that other than that, he thought it was a good poster and that it has given him an idea of a film he would like to make.
Another person we asked, an Asian girl called Lily said “Oh wow. I would watch this. It appeals to me firstly because I’m Asian and because I like horror movies. She looks like a typical Asian girl”. Of all of the feedback that I gathered on that day, I felt that this one was very vital as we had hardly asked any Asians of their views on this as our sub-genre was J-horror. Lily said she liked it and that she would watch it with a variety of her friends because it’s something that she’s into.

Not only was this feedback good for us, it allowed us to know if the target audience would watch it, as we tried to mimic the foundations of an actual J-horror movie, and we found out by this feedback that we have been successful.

By my street survey, I found out that most of the people I asked would watch it because it looks scary and the sense of fear is something that everyone likes to tweak as being scared is fun when you’re with other people.

I took my iPad with me and also showed some of the people the trailer for the movie and they said that they wished that they could watch the whole movie, and even in a loud and very busy environment, they said that parts of it made them scared; scared enough to want to go and watch it.

Producing a Teaser meant that we had to think of many differnt ways to produce feedback along the way. The members of the group all used such websites as twitter, facebook and msn, the groups used these familiar websites to their advantage in this project. We used these websites to free promote and advertise our teaser trailer, which we planned would generate more feedback to help us for this point of the evaluation.

Youtube:

After uploading the teaser to youtube, people began commenting on the video, both by either commenting on the video in the spaces provided or by word of mouth . uploading the video to youtube meant a wider vairety of audiece, this includes a worldwide audience, and also at the touch of a bottom the video can be shared on such websites as facebook, twitter ect, this also created a buzz about the trailer and feedback followed peoples views of the video.

For feedback on youtube such as :
Needs a bit more screen time for the beginning text (production names etc)
obnoxiousxb 1 week ago

all i have to say is that she looks like the ring chick LOL
masterbladeblade 4 days ago

Feedback like this on youtube helps the group see errors, in which if the video was to be made again, these errors can be corrected. Also this feedback gives the group critisism that may be needed for them to higher there quality of work, and also its an insight into the media industry and in my opinion the group has acknowleged how hard it is to produce products which will get praised by almost everyone.

The comments on youtube got the group to realise that the title "lullabye" looked fairly blurry as it zoomed into it at the end of the teaser, therefore if the group produced a teaser now, we would change the effect on the title to make it look more professional and less pixelated.

Also the feedback show the group the outcome of the video is what we actually planned in the being of the process, our plan was to make a conventional horror teaser, with a Asian character to keep to the streotypical Japanese horror feature.

Using the satistics on youtube I found out the age range, how people found the actual video on youtube and where in the world they are, which has some interesting outcomes.

Statistics:

Email:

Using my college email, i sent a simplistic email around the college to get feedback off of the students, this helped because it produce another way of people providing feedback and also there people that most of the group memebers do not know therefore they can tell the group what they truthfully think about the whole teaser via email.

The email sent provided some interesting feedback from a few students, some of the feedback is below that was in depth, most student either emailed back such words as "wow" or "good video" and one teacher emailed "Very Autentic".

All feedback is good, however feedback in depth produces a better outcome, this therefore means that the group can find ways to improve all the negative comments. Also comment like "wow" do not tell me much about the video, or what the person actually thought of it, therefore this way of feedback provided on the person who emails back is very hit and miss. In other words, if the person watches the video and doesn't write back then the process didnt actually do what it was meant to do.

However such ways to get feedback also produce a buzz about the video around such places as the college, some students sent in depth feedback as shown below.
The email feedback shows me that students aged 16 see this video as professionally done, also enjoying the quick cuts and vairation of the shots. Also one of the students commented on the opening shot of where Lucy slowly lifts her head up with the focus changing, saying it looked professional and experiment.

Audience Feedback from youtube and microsoft outlook, (College Email) as the group send the video to the whole college for feedback.

The problem with some audience feedback is that it may be very biased, in other words you could show a family member your video and they will always give you praise for the video no matter how it looked, this meant the group had to find feedback from a different source, this meant using youtube would have been the best idea, this is because anyone can find the video on youtube, and people say what the actually feel because there identity is more private.

Using such sites as facebook meant some feedback was very biased, and people didn't say anything bad about the video or any room for improvement because they personally knew one of the group members.

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As soon as our 'Lullabye' teaser trailer was completed, I was overly excited about the responses as i was very proud of the overall production of 'Lullabye' so the first thing i did was to make sure it gets promoted properly and made sure people are watching the video to boost the amount of views. The first website i post our 'Lullabye' teaser trailer on was Facebook which i go on everyday and have a maximum of 150 friends who would be able to watch my video once i post it on the news feed.

Here is the amount of feedback i managed to get from posting our 'Lullabye' teaser trailer on Facebook. The comments are mainly positive but that could just be because they are my friends and family which would mean they wouldn't comment and write the bad points about the teaser trailer which is why posting it on YouTube where anyone can access the video and comment on it is a good way of getting contructive criticism from the general public.

Comments evolved around the teaser trailer being scary enough to frighten people, the consistent suspence and that the variety of angle shots worked really well. 15 people also took the time to 'like' the video which shows they liked the video and it was a great success. We also hope that people continue to watch the teaser trailer.

Although the general comments and feedback were positive, I asked my friend what he thought of my teaser trailer and he gave me several criticisms which we could take under account if we were to make another teaser trailer, the feedback he gave me was that the our teaser trailer was too over exposed and light which is why it wasnt enough to scare them and for it to be more scary it needed to be darker. I completely agree with this comment as i too thought some of the shots were very light and certainly needed to be darker to create a more frightening response. He also commented about the font title of 'Lullabye' saying that it looked "babyish" and that "Baby font + baby title = baby film" which hurt me at first because i thought it was very mean of him to say this, generally people have different opinions about what suits what and if i were to argue about the font of the title (which i created myself), i would argue that the title and the font suits the film very well due to it relating to children.

As well as posting our teaser trailer to the news feed of Facebook so my friends and family can view the video, i also posted it on a open-public website called 'Luuux'. Luuux is a website which is available to anyone who has a log in account and they can use the website to gain points to buy items from the Luuux shop. I decided to post our teaser trailer on Luuux because a lot of people go on it everyday and hoping that people would see it, click it to boost up our viewing count on YouTube and give some feedback. Previously I have posted about other subjects on Luuux and i have gotten a few responses depending on if the topic is interesting or not, but unfortunately i did not gain a lot of feedback or comments for posting it on Luuux. Instead i only got one comment back:

Although i didn't get as many comments as i hoped from posting our teaser trailer on Luuux, by posting it on the website could have helped boost our view count as people would click the video to watch it and we are now up to 1,018 views on YouTube which is a great success!

Most of our view counts come from Facebook (199 views altogether):

Another main point is that the age of our audiences range from 13-17 (female), 18-24 (female) to 18-24 (male) which are generally young people. I think the reason why our audiences age range from these numbers is due to the reason that we posted it onto Facebook (where we got the most views) and by sharing it amongst our friends on Facebook who are generally our ages or a few years older/younger. This shows that Facebook played a bit part in us getting up to the 1,018 views we got.

Although our teaser trailer is based around J-horror and relates to popular J-horror movies such as 'The Ring' or 'The Grudge', we assumed our teaser trailer would be popular around Asia, especially Japan, but we were wrong. In fact it has the least views in Asia.

Suprisingly our Japanese-horror themed teaser trailer is most popular in South Africa which was a shock due to it not involving any African or caucasian actors in the teaser trailer but one Asian girl so we would have guessed it would be more popular in Asian countries, especially Japan.

From our audience feedback we learnt a few important factors about decisions made while we created our media products, if i had time to consider making adjustments to the media products, small and relevant touches would have been made to ensure our media products would have appealed to our audience to an appropriate industry standard. Some causes of action would have been as follows:

The audience feedback that i received for the Magazine front cover became very useful, i would firstly considered putting some sort of highlight or bolding effect in photoshop on the 'LULLABYE' word as this does not stand out as a relevant word and seems to camouflage with in the magazine front cover. Also i would have attempted to make a little more room for 'Lullabye' on the layout as some of the feedback received stated that they thought that this word did not stick out enough and seems as if it has been just placed there, this can be seen a major mistake as it is not professional for a designer to do so. However the audience did mention that they like the shadow over the eye complementing that this added a sense of horror feel, this comment shows that the main image has be adequately composed and the correct lighting has been used to appeal to the nature of the magazine.

They also complemented the Masthead, saying that it has been constructed "effectively" and is also structured well with the rest of the magazine. This is useful and makes me feel that the magazine has been laid out to a near enough real media product standard. Overall from this feedback i learnt that the Magazine was laid out effectively and can be recognised as a horror edition of a Film Magazine Front Cover by our target audience.

The Movie poster audience feedback also became useful in that i also discovered a problem with the Movie font as some of the audience from the feedback also stated that they could not make out/see the Title properly over the characters hand, if i had the opportunity to make adjustments to our work i believe we would again adjust the font or applied a Highlight/Shadow/Bold effect onto the Font. The other adjustment i would consider is making a shadowed fade towards the bottom so that the information at the bottom can be read blatantly apart from the photo. From the feedback i understand that the movie poster has also been recognised as the intended media product by the targeted audience, as conventions were effectively followed.