Evaluation Pt.3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

For my audience feedback I used a focus group of people with different tastes in order to decide what needed to be changed about the trailer and what could be done to make it better.

My audience for this product were 18 year olds, to people in their mid 20s; this age group is represented by the main character.

This is the main character from the product. He represents the aforementioned age group. The way this character was made was so that he could be universally applied to many different social groups in the sense that he is from a less privilege background and has to work to achieve his goals. Although he goes about achieving these goals in the wrong way, the goals are still prevalent.

This represents my target audience because the vast majority of my audience if not all will have had to work for at least something in their lives. This will be especially true of older people because they’ll either be in employment or studying at university or trying to get into university.

One of the biggest similarities between the two in terms of costume and appearance is that they are both well dressed in suits. The suits could connote wealth and power or the acquisition of both through the course of the film. The suits could also connote that they are important character in the product, both being main characters. The tilted look of both characters makes them both look more dramatic especially on the picture of Gerard Butler who plays “One Two”. These two have a similar role in their respective films in the sense that ‘One Two’ is mainly known as a petty criminal who gets hired for a very big job that could make him and his friends rich for life. Similarly, ‘Joel’ in his film starts of needing money and ends up owing a lot of money to people so he has to start paying it back by committing petty crimes and then moves his way up to bigger things and eventually robbing banks. So in this sense the two characters have a similar role in their films; they both take orders from other people and commit crimes for their benefit.

This is the male equivalent of my target audience. The kind of music my target audience is varied, because not many people just listen to one type of music, people tend to associate largely with one or two types of music but as a whole people listen to different types of music. So I chose ‘POWER’ which is a song that has had critical acclaim from critics and most people enjoy the song so this will play towards my target audience. The target audience will also be the type to shops they would shop at would most likely be River Island, Topman, H&M and Blue Inc. as represented by the target audience. The type of TV programme my target audience would watch would most likely be “The Wire” or other shows to that nature.

 My target audience will like my product because the costumes I used in the trailer were mainly from Topman, River Island & Blue Inc. so the audience will be able to identify the clothes if not the actual clothes then the style will be very familiar for them. Also my trailer shows crime, violence & drugs things typically found in the show “The Wire” and it shows scenes of action and in places the editing is rapid enough for it not to get boring or too slow so it should keep my target audience entertained ands they should the film/trailer.

Focus Group  

For our audience feedback we decided to form a focus group comprised of 5 people.
After forming a focus group of 5 people to watch our trailer then give us feedback about what works and what doesn’t we got the feedback and we knew what to change about the trailer.

From initial audience feedback the beginning of the trailer seemed too much like the beginning of a film and less like a trailer. So it needed to be reedited, this presented a bit of a challenge in the sense that if we were cut/ alter the beginning of the trailer we would essentially have to redo most of it. This would have been needed to be done because the trailer was edited together so that the timing of the elements from the footage and the music fit in together along with the voice overs to create a certain atmosphere. This obviously posed a challenge to try and recreate a similar atmosphere with less footage. So instead of trying to cut part of the trailer and moving a couple things around, we decided to just redo the entire trailer with the footage we had shot previously. In the end we had an entirely different trailer but once we got the focus group together again and we got feedback for the revised product and the feedback this time was a lot more positive, the comments were as follows; 

• It feels a lot more like a trailer and less like an independent film
• It’s a lot shorter and doesn’t drag on anymore
• It flows better
• It doesn’t reveal as much information as before and makes me want to find out more
• As a whole the product flows and feels better than before.

From the feedback I learnt that my first draft of the product didn’t really feel like a ‘real’ product and had to be edited down to be shorter and flow better in order to feel like a ‘real’ media text. The audience feedback helped me evaluate my media product because if I hadn’t gotten people who were outside the creation of the media product you are bound to get some bias towards your product so getting an outside perspective to get a fresh look and unbiased critique of the work. So with the audience feedback I was about to find out which areas exactly needed my attention.