Evaluation Part 4

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I learnt a lot from my audience feedback derived from the focus group and final evaluation screening, both of which are posted on my blog. I was able to see what parts of the Live: Stream trailer people really liked, and what parts people thought were in need of improving. People really the ‘Short engaging text’, the ‘overall story’, and the ‘great use of gore’.

However there were also points that people thought could use some improving. People thought that there needed to be more of a ‘built up ending’. As well as this people thought an ‘arm wound’ would make the trailer much more powerful as well as ‘more blood in the chainsaw scene’. I strongly agree with all the points made, both on the what they thought was good, and the improvement side. Since I have received this feedback, I have worked on changing around our final piece to help achieve some of the improvements that my group have said. I changed the ending of the Live: Stream trailer and added very different music to my final piece to help make the last minute scare much more effective and I believe that it worked very well. I have also added some more text and changed the pacing of my '1...2...3...' countdown part of my trailer to make it more suspense building. I believe that it worked very effectively and my group's feedback helped greatly toward my final piece.

From the focus group I learnt a lot about the Live: Stream trailer and lots of different bits that I could add to it to make it even better than it is now. More effects were still needed when the chainsaw meets the arm is one point that came up quite a lot. There was also a gap in the music which has to be fixed otherwise it looks slightly less professional. These changes did not take much time and were done relatively easily on Final Cut Pro. However, on the whole by looking at the audience feedback sheets I can see that everyone enjoyed the trailer on the whole and it worked for them. The ending also made a few people in the room jump, so changing it from the old one was a good decision.

The chainsaw effect and the music are the main points that came up during the evaluation process. I do strongly agree with these points as they were things that I picked up on straight away whilst I watched the trailer. Another point that came up was the scene when we see someone looking at the computer screen when the tortures are happening could be changed or shortened slightly. A few people thought that it was slightly funny due to the reaction to the screen. Only a minority of the group found that though, so I may leave that as it is as I and the majority of the rest of the group was as well.

On average our trailer scored an 8/10 after the Focus Group, which I'm very happy with. After changes were added we were sure it could make a 9/10. Changes included the chainsaw scene as well as the music. I also watched through the rest of the trailer carefully and make sure that there is nothing else that needed changing. Some of the screams needed to be tweaked very slightly to make everything run a little bit smoother.

After the evaluation screening and seeing what the audience's reaction was to the final cut of Live: Stream I am very happy with the audience's response. There were points in the trailer that made people jump and points that really drew people into the narrative of Live: Stream. The story is made very clear. I can see that it does appeal to horror fans very well. I can tell this by the way that people reacted to certain parts of the clip and how the clip creates an extremely uneasy and worrying atmosphere. Both mine and the audience's favourite aspect of the trailer is the whole storyline. We both felt as if it was put across very well and was easy to follow.