Question 3 written form

Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback? (MUST REFER TO FILM, POSTER AND RADIO TRAILER)

Our target audience fall into the demographic category of D and E, psychographic categories of explorers, rebels and mainstreamers, are the ages of 15+ and are an active audience as they have to guess who the killer is, and we follow a non-linear narrative.

For our main product, participants in the focus groups and survey said that they mainly preferred psychological horror genres, which influenced why we chose our narrative to be a psychological one, as we wanted to give our target audience what they wanted. They also said that they usually associated psychological horrors to be set in the house, and we decided to challenge this convention as our main location was in fact the house, but the murders happen in the woods and not in the house. We did this to make out film stand out from other psychological horror films that do not always use the same conventions. We decided to present our narrative to a group from our target audience and they said they would watch our film.

We presented our pitch of our first ideas of a partially blind protagonist with the rest of the narrative similar to the one we have now. The feedback we received was to analyse different psychological films to enable us to have an idea of how to portray manic depression and a pseudo identity. This helped us a lot as we didn’t have a clue on how to portray this on our character, and analysing movies such as ‘Split’ allowed me to learn that editing techniques such as jump cuts, high angles and glitches could show that a person is not mentally stable. Another suggestion was to have quick flashes of newspaper clippings being stuck on the wall if we wanted to show that there were multiple murders happening in the area.

After our pitch and further feedback, we realised that our target audience is the age of 15+ and that people of this age and the demographics of D and E do not really use newspapers, and so we decided to have footage of a news story from a TV and mobile phone messages instead to represent verisimilitude and realism. This would appeal to our audience as they relate to the film as in this era we now use digital technology and web 2.0 to deliver messages around. We then had the idea of getting WhatsApp messages to replace newspaper clippings, allowing our target audience to relate to receiving texts. This may also make them want to watch our film as they can relate to it.

We had several draft scripts to whom we showed professionals and target audience, and they told us to improve it by adding in more camera shots, and at least a little dialogue so we know what’s going on in the movie and so that it is not completely silent. When editing our final product, I found that there was a point where there was no continuity. This was the scene where there was continuity editing of our main character entering the kitchen to grab the bowl of pasta, however when she is going out her hair is in a ponytail whereas before it was in a bun. To fix this, we added an additional scene where there is a close up of her taking out her hair from a bun, which then helped us fix our continuity. However, her daily morning routine extended our film by 2 extra minutes, and I cut them down but having jump cuts of her routine. For example, I cut from Mila being in the bathroom, then to the kitchen to eat her toast, and then to the corridor where she gets out for work.

Further feedback was that the target audience did not understand the narrative of the story – they didn’t understand that Mila had two identities. To clarify this, we included a wide shot scene of bad Mila interrogating good Mila to kill her bullies as 'revenge' whilst the psychologist asks her questions, but the audience do not know what the revenge is until the end of the film. This creates an enigma code as the audience will question what the revenge is and why she does it but then they will find out during the process of the film.

From audience feedback of watching the bullying scenes that I edited, they said to make it black and white instead of a sepia colour because then it would represent a flashback and show the past well. Also, when they watched the text messages appear on the screen when Mila woke up, our target audience did not recognise that she was receiving texts but instead thought she was sending one. This was useful as this scene engaged with the audience and proved to us that we do have an active audience as we planned instead of a passive one.
When I received feedback from our first draft edit of the film, our target audience did not understand what was happening at the beginning as they could not hear Mila speaking and the music was too loud. In order to fix this, I dubbed my vice in during the scenes and also during when Mila kills the second bullies as they didn't understand why two of the bullies were found at the park and one was in a room chained up. Thus, this lead me to say 'Just do it, kill her, she deserves it' in a whisper and a normal voice overlayed together which creates a scary type of voice in the head. 

We conducted both survey and focus groups to construct our products of a radio trailer, poster and horror film. The survey feedback we got for the radio trailer showed that most people wanted the trailer to be about 1 minute which we conformed to, otherwise they would get bored. Our trailer was a little less than a minute but we gave a little of the plot away and not too much as this is what the audience wanted. For example, we mentioned that there had been two murders but did not mention who the killer is, which creates an enigma code among the audience as they will have to figure out who it is themselves, to which the reception theory can apply too. This is the preferred reading to our product as it’s how we intended it. *Many people thought that there should be spooky and eerie sounds / music throughout the trailer which connotes that it is of a horror genre. To do this, we made our own sounds using a keyboard and changed the settings to ‘5’ which allowed the keys on the keyboard to play distorted sounds. We then recorded and edited this with fast pace editing and the slamming of doors to build up tension in the trailer. The use of these dialogues showed that these are the important parts to our film, for example, the trailer started off with ‘breaking news…’* Many people who took part in the survey also said that they would rather hear the trailer in places such as shops, the radio or on television. However, as we are students and are on a low-budget production, we cannot afford this. What the most votes was on was YouTube. Knowing this, I know that if I wanted to create a campaign for my product, I would release a trailer on YouTube as our target audience is more likely to see it on YouTube because they are young, and it is one of the most used platforms on web 2.0. This is also mainly how mainstream companies release their trailers and teasers compared to independent films.

With further feedback from our scripts, our audience told us that to keep them hooked we should have some sort of distorted voice after the news reporter says “breaking news” in the trailer and suggested that we include a reverb of this. So, to make our product stronger, unique and keep the audience hooked, we included a reverb of the beginning of the newscast and also where the police have found the bullies bodies to connote that this is a significant location in the film, as this is where the dead bodies are found and they do not know how they got there.

Our target audience that took part in the surveys and focus groups told us not to put too much of a plain picture in the poster that we create, which led us to create the poster of two girls facing back to back in the middle of the woods with the title across the top. This however was one of the first drafts of our poster, as so we got feedback to improve it. We planned a few days until we managed to recreate it on Photoshop, which from the audience feedback (from undergraduates) said it looked like we ‘chucked typography all over it’. So, we decided to reduce the typography and move it from ‘all over the place’ on to bottom, as we had to remember that an audience who usually looks at the poster reads it from the top left and makes their way down for more information. Also, we were advised to work with a grid to make everything in line so that it fits within the border and margins. One member of the audience said that perhaps we could include a picture of the main character malfunctioning, not showing if she is the antagonist or the protagonist, and on both sides of her, having the ‘spirits’ as to say, of her personalities, and to change one of the character’s faces to show a clear difference between personalities. Through the three faces in the poster, we created an enigma code as the target audience don’t know if it is three people who are in the poster or if they are just different personalities. The two personalities standing beside the main character also connotes good vs bad binary opposites as they would do in a traditional belief that many people have – a good and a bad angel on either side of you, telling you what to do. In the survey, the participants also said that they would prefer there to be dark colours so that it associates with the horror genre. So through mise-en-scene, we added the colour black for the hoodies that the character wears (in both the poster and the film), and added a dark overlay to make it look like the trees were taken during the night time. We then changed our tagline to ‘Everybody has a good and a bad side’ instead of ‘everybody has a good and a bad side, unfortunately, Mila’s bullies discover both’. This helped to save space on the poster and also made it less mouthy for us to use in our radio trailer. The title and the tagline was a clear link between the two ancillary products, and the images in the poster and the dialogue in the radio trailer link to what happens in the movie, allowing our target audience to make connections and then go and watch the movie as a whole, to complete the questions they may have from the enigma codes that our products send out. And so, the feedback from the post production stages has enabled us to create a stronger product to fit the interests of our target audience.

From the practitioner interview in my research it allowed me to know what the best way to produce a low budget production is and which equipment is the best to produce crisp quality products.

From the analysis of our radio survey responses, I found that many of the participants would listen to the trailer in a variety of places, such as the shops or the radio or on television. What the most votes was on was YouTube. Knowing this, I know that if I wanted to create a campaign for my product, I would release a trailer on YouTube as our target audience is more likely to see it on YouTube because they are young and it is easy and free to access. This was useful in seeing where our target audience are most likely to listen to things.

The feedback obtained from the questionnaires on our poster shows that the audience associate dark colours, mainly black with horror films and posters and that it would be good if we did this. For our audience satisfaction, we included dark colours such as the colours of the hoodies and the trees but kept the font and typography visible and bright by using the colours reds and white.

Furthermore, audience feedback obtained after the dry cut edit of our film was that our target audience didn’t understand what was going on in the film and did not know that Mila has a pseudo identity. In order to fix this problem, we added an additional scene at the beginning of our film where both good and bad Mila are talking to each other on the screen, and where bad Mila wants good Mila to have ‘revenge’ over her bullies. Our narrative here then becomes circular as at the end of the film we are back in the same office where both Milas’ spoke to each other; this time there is a mid-shot of bad Mila looking angry with someone else asking who she is talking to, thus connoting that Mila was imaging her other identity and was speaking to someone else. This made our product stronger as when we did the second audience feedback and reactions, they understood what the narrative was, but our opening titles and credits had been too fast. We then fixed this so they were longer to see at the beginning and the end.

My short horror film goes against Todorov’s equilibrium theory as my narrative starts off with a disequilibrium in the first place and ends in one too. The disequilibrium that starts off the narrative is Mila stabbing the bully to death, and the ending of the short film is of a wide shot and aerial shot of Mila running away and then giving the audience a little smirk. This creates an enigma code as it leaves my audience wondering what happened next and therefore goes against Todorov’s theory because there is no equilibrium in my narrative. This also goes against and Noel Carroll’s quote where he says that a narrative consists of an ‘onset phase, discovery phase and disruption phase’ as the disruption in my narrative has already happened before the onset or discovery phase. This is because the flashback of Mila stabbing the bully is the disruption phase. The discovery phase comes near to the end of my narrative when Mila finds out that she killed her bullies somehow.

The representation of my characters are not in the form of conventional stereotypes. For example, my main character is a girl and is represented as both the antagonist and protagonist. The way she is presented as the protagonist is when she kills off her bullies on order to save herself from being tortured, and when she is being bullied, the bullies are the antagonists. But then eventually at the end of the fil the audience will realised that the positions of these characters have stopped as killing someone is out of the norm and is a very big crime to take someone’s life. Usually women in the films and music video s dress more with their skin showing or have tightly fitted clothes, which would support Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze. However, in my film this contradicts this as the main character Mila, is always wearing something that is a size bigger than hers and nothing that is revealing or provocative. She’s also represented as a normal teen because she wears jeans to school and work. The bullies are represented in two ways – one as over the top and as a conventional bully with her hair tied up, wearing a bomber jacket and being a little hulky. She is the main bully that starts to bully Mila. This portrayed our one very well. Doing research, I found that on films, the convention of bullies is to have one main one and one that is always the little minded one that supports the big-minded one, and this is where bully 2 comes in, dressed in a ‘normal ‘costume. However, we managed to follow a stereotypical convention of a news reporter, which is that they speak formally and dress like it too. This created verisimilitude as this it was presented like how an actual news report is presented.

During my research, some people on my survey had said they like blood and gore in a horror film. Although we included this in our product, we were unsure if it was suitable for our certification of the film which is 15 as there was a shot of the knife inserting the body. I then decided to look at the BBFC criteria’s in more detail and also emailed them about my personal issue. From the response, I realised that our film certification did not need to go up to an 18 as there was not any sadistic violence and gory scenes that carried on for too long, thus making my film suitable for a 15.I also did further research on other products such as ‘Black Mirror’ and found that there are scenes that are more violent and gory than ours that is still rated a 15 and therefore found it suitable to keep to a 15.

Finally, as we are independent film makers, if we were to seek distribution from conglomerate companies such as ones in the Big 6, we would do this through direct communication in film festivals such as the Cannes. This is because they are well known and can help to raise awareness of a new film coming out soon.