Evaluation Question 3 – What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Chandler, James, Celina, Jasmine

Target Audience

To identify who our target audience was, we had all used survey monkey individually to give us an idea of who the target group is. Our target audience would be both female and male, aged at 15 and over. This is because the genre of gangster crime is mainly aimed at males but at the same time a female protagonist can intrigue the female audience. The other types of questions that we would have on the survey were:- Favorite genre- Hobbies- Gender of a gangster protagonist- The social networks they use

Looking back on the surveys we conducted for research, it is evident that the audience feedback we obtained from these surveys influenced us greatly.

When asked “What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a gangster film?” most people mentioned “mafia”, “mob”, “gang” (see fig.1) so we made sure to include a scene where a groupshot of gangsters aka the yakuza.

The audience expected a male protagonist (see fig. 2) so we subverted this expectation by using a female protagonist which became our unique selling point. We gave the audience the unexpected rather than tradition ideas.

Another way we would identify our target audience was we created a demographic brainstorm. Here this would display what type of things that our target audience

would be interested in. This would help with who is exactly our target audience. This would later help with how we could appeal our final products to them.

Feedback Questions

• Chandler and Celina posted the trailer on Facebook and asked if people could watch it and leave a comment on YouTube. We got more than 15 comments. We also asked people to watch out trailer and recorded their reactions live.

YouTube comments part 1• Overall feedback was positive, the comments underlined in

green show positive feedback and the red is criticisms/improvements. The subtitles worked well and a person picked out our unique selling point (female lead)

• However one person found that the dialogue seemed a bit scripted. Perhaps we could have said it with less emphasis.

• We had some issues with the dialogue/diegetic voices during post-production. When we imported the music, making sure the dialogue could still be heard was our biggest challenge because even at the highest volume, the dialogue was still quiet. To fix this we should have tried audio software such as Audacity.

YouTube comments part 2One person gave a lot of constructive feedback about the dialogue and the order of the trailer. They thought that the production company and distribution logo should have come before the introduction to reinforce the Yakuza principles. Again, the low volume of the diegetic dialogue detracted from the impact of what she was saying. They thought the montage should have been slower, although we thought that if it was slower it would have lingered too long on the establishing shot.A few people noticed that some shots were out of focus but we purposefully did that especially when it came to the gun pointing as we wanted the scene to be ambiguous. They also proposed a punch sound effect in the ending scene of the trailer to make it more effective.

Social media was one of the ways to distribute our film trailer to gain feedback from different audiences.

On the left are the apps that were accessible to the majority of our target audience such as Whatsapp, Snapchat and Instagram.

One of the people (Aaron) distributed a link to our film trailer to others, meaning that more people would give feedback on YouTube and that our film was shared around rather than just us distributing. Aaron passed the trailer onto his friends who are studying media related subjects, they left the comment on YouTube that gave the constructive feedback and this helped us a lot to find out what needs improvement on our trailer.

Also, other people gave criticism on the trailer through Snapchat, Richard said he liked the shots and editing of the trailer, he also liked the bonsai tree ‘tattoo’.

Using WhatsApp, we sent the video of our trailer to many of our group chats and also sent it to individual people, we had many replies from people and their reaction after watching the trailer draft.

One person replied with what he thought was the plot of our trailer, he was not completely right with the narrative, but when he volunteered to watch the final trailer, he finally understood with the voiceover that was added on.

Also, another person commented about music that we added to our trailer and liked how it fit the trailer, they also understood the narrative more with the voiceover and how it ‘makes more sense’.

Audience Feedback 1 – Trailer Draft

For the trailer draft feedback, our audience had guessed that our genre of our film trailer was action/thriller. Mainly the fighting scenes would make them think think this way, as most gangster films rely on shooting with guns rather than hand to hand combat. What we have learned from this is that we should have used more gangster iconography rather than using cultural aspects of Japanese gangsters. One person had recognized that it was the gangster crime genre. Some of the audience were unable to distinguish whether the film was about Chinese or Japanese mafia. Perhaps because the montage was filmed in Chinatown. However when the subtitles came on some people recognized the Japanese language.

Audience Feedback 2 – Final Trailer

In both the drafts and the final cut, the most confusing part of our trailer was the the flashback scene; using the voiceover improved the audience’s understanding of the plot.Another point of improvement is that the dunking scene, showing one of the enemies on the hit list being tortured, should have been extended a bit longer. Other than that the audience was impressed by our trailer.