WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?Gemma Tonge

WHY DOES THE FILM INDUSTRY SPEND SO MUCH TIME AND MONEY TEST SCREENING FILMS TO INVITED AUDIENCES OR FINDING OUT WHAT AUDIENCES LIKE THROUGH MARKET RESEARCH?

The film industry spends so much time and money test screening films to invited audiences and finding out what audiences like through market research. They do this because it is essential that film makers know who they are trying to appeal to. After they gather research on the audience they are targeting for a particular film, they then know what types of media to advertise the film on. Social media is a huge part of advertising and it is vital that you know who your target audience is in order to reach them in their everyday lives.

For example if you were targeting a film to an older audience of 50+ it would be more effective to advertise on Tv, Radio and at bus stops. This is where this audience is most likely to hear about things. Social media would not be as effective when trying to reach this audience. This is why it is imperative to know who your audience is in order to marketing a media product to them effectively.

WHO IS YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE? For our promotional package for our romantic comedy genre film our

target audience are 15-24 year olds females. We researched into our target audience using primary and

secondary information. For our secondary research we used pearl and dean to look at the

audience demographic of our film influences. This is the audience demographic for the film ‘Project X’. As you can

see from the data collected, the main target audience are males aged 15-24.

For our primary research we gave questionnaires to our target audience to fill out and we also created a vox pops on males and females aged 15-24 which is in our target audience group.

AT WHAT STAGES DID YOU ASK YOUR AUDIENCE QUESTIONS OR GET THEIR FEEDBACK? After our first rough cut of our teaser trailer we gained feedback

in the form of questionnaires and a vox pop which we uploaded using vimeo.

We then took that feedback to make vital changes to our teaser trailer. After our first rough cuts of our poster and magazine cover we then gained feedback from all three of our products in our promotional package for our rom-com genre film.

We did this by using the same questionnaire and the same target group which fit with our target audience. This helped us

to make final changes to our media products.

HOW DID YOU GET THIS FEEDBACK?  We obtained this feedback by creating a

questionnaire for our class to fill in. They were rated on miss en scene, camera work,

editing, sound, titles, conventions and brand identity on a scale of excellent, good, ok, poor and very poor.

There was space on the sheets for our audience to give us high detailed qualitative feedback which helped us to improve on our products rather than the likert scale where there are only boxes to tick which give no explanation or suggestions for improvements.

Another way we obtained feedback was through social media. We used Facebook to post our teaser trailer on YouTube. We asked for them to watch it and tell us their opinions. This was a great way of getting feedback from our target audience which was a quick and easy way.

HOW DID YOU USE THIS FEEDBACK?

One of the main aspects we got from our feedback was that we need to lower the volume of our voice over. This is because it made it sound artificial, we lowered the volume levels and it made it flow much better and it sounds less artificial.

Our audience said that they loved the soundtrack and party scenes and that it flowed well. This helped us find out the strengths of our teaser trailer so we knew not to change the things that our audience liked.

One group said we needed a company ident on our first screening of our rough cut. This helped and we were sure to create one by the time we did our second screening for feedback.