The Spectrum

Audience Feedback

As a group we organised a screening of our trailer in which we invited 20 people to watch and comment on it via survey monkey, a further 30 people also took part in our survey which was advertised over the Facebook page we created for “The Spectrum.”

We collected audience feedback from 50 people from varied ages to ensure the data collected was not generation/gender biased.

We were successful in our creation of a trailer adhering to the social realism genre as 84% of people said that the trailer was not only reflective of the social realism genre (which based on our previous research is not a particularly popular genre) but that a great majority 98% of people (49/50) would want to see the complete film. Not only has this data shown us that we were successful in creating a niche film addressing real social issues, but it has also shown us that there is a gap in the market for films that address reality verses the popular action films available for viewers in huge box office cinemas such as the “Odeon”. Despite a small 8% of people who recognized “The Spectrum” as a Romantic Drama and a further 8% as a Drama we feel that this could be viewed in a positive light, as it shows our narrative has different layers to it which opens it up to a wider demographic of viewers who enjoy Drama’s and Romantic Dramas which we originally aimed to include as part of the hybridisation of our production between the “Rites of Passage” and “The Romance”.

Interestingly despite 72% of viewers saying that social disability was not portrayed in a negative light, 12% of people thought it was. Clearly here our aim of empowering those suffering from social disability was not as successful as we had aimed which we hoped to achieve through the voiceover of Noah which carried the narrative. A further 16% of people felt that social disability was portrayed in neither a positive or negative light, which to an extent was a result we hoped to achieve. One of our orginal aims was not to make a trailer about a boy suffering from Aspergers Syndrome, but to use social disability as a vehicle to explore what society defines as “normal”. Therefore the 16% of

people’s response shows that we have been successful in placing emphasis on “normality” rather than social disability. Which is shown in the results of Question 3, as 76% of people felt the prominent theme within the trailer was the questioning of normality, versus the 18% who felt social disability was the overriding theme.

As said previously, we used the dictionary definition of “normal” as the exposition of the trailer to present everyone as somewhat dysfunctional, whether it is through a social disability or the reckless behaviour teenagers are often criticised for. Therefore these results show that we were successful in not only making a trailer about Aspergers Syndrome but we also created a trailer that is relative to everyone, as we hoped to show in the trailer, nobody conforms precisely to what is normal.

We decided to use the spectrum of autism as the inspiration for our title, to an extent this could be interpreted to suggest that people interpret the title “The Spectrum” to suggest that the main themes in the trailer are autism. 92% of people said the title was relevant showing that despite our aim of questioning normality through social disability, 98% of people would see a film about autism, which is a result we did not expect as we perceived from the start of the production “The Spectrum” to be a niche film with a niche audience of art house cinema goers, clearly this is not the case and “The Spectrum”

does appeal to a wider demographic then we had initially anticipated.

92% of viewers said that the music used was effective, we used 2 soundtracks, the first being “Call me in the Afternoon” by Half Moon Run and the segue soundtrack “Set the Fire to the Third bar” by Snow Patrol ft Martha Wainwright. We used the juxtaposition between a lighthearted and more dramatic soundtrack to show the fluctuating emotions of adolescence.

One of our initial worries when editing our trailer was that the narrative would be lost along such a variety of scenes that we used, to ensure a narrative was conveyed to audiences we decided to use the voiceover of the main protagonist to carry the narrative and give a voice to those suffering from social disability.

Our use of the voiceover must have been successful as 96% of people agreed that the narrative within the trailer was made clear, verses a small minority of 4% who disagreed, this shows our use of the voiceover in carrying the narrative was successful.

84% of people agreed that the trailer, poster and magazine cover complement one another. From these responses it is apparent that we have been successful in creating a cohesive branding image which conveys the social realism genre as 86% people agreed. Across the main and ancillary tasks we used minimalism as well as raw emotion to subvert the stereotypical idealised version of youth as perfect, we used close proximities across all 3 products and naturalistic settings to enable audiences to relate to the characters.

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