3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback has helped to influence my decisions throughout the planning and construction stages. From the intial ideas, I usd my audience feedback to help get a sense of what my target audience wanted to see in a crime-thriller. Once I found my target audience and my target market, I incorporated what they would like to see along side the things I had seen were included in other crime-thriller films and what I thought worked well. I used a range of technological platforms to access my target audience and also did some face to face.

Here is the a link to my most recent survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P5RMKSK 
Examples of my audience feeback in the planning stages:



I found my audience feedback particularly helpful when joining with my group, Claire and Megan, to create Insignia productions. We all had different ideas that we wanted to take forward and we found it difficult to decide amongst ourselves what we thought would work best so we asked members of our class and used social media to publish our survey that included a brief summary of each of our ideas. This helped us massively as we were then able to narrow down our ideas and focus on one idea.

SurveyMonkey was a great way to distribute my survey and collect and organise the answers we received as it was almost instant and could be easily accessed and used by my target market, that have experience in using computers. However, I also chose to do some research with older members of my audience and recorded this with soundcloud.




After using my target audience feedback to help me plan the narrative alongside theory and my own research, I referred to it constantly in my construction stages. It taught me exactly what my audience wanted to see and I cast my characters, prepared my locations and mise-en-scene based on this. It also had a big influence on the type of music, fonts and colours I used as I wanted to create this 'crime' but 'real' feel that I knew my audience were looking for. I also thought it was important to ask my audience what they thought of my final products when they were finally finished as these were the people I wanted to appeal to. Having a key audience in mind made it much easier in a sense, as I knew I was constantly needing to please others. However, I also had to make decisions that were influenced by their opinions rather than my own. An example of this is when I wanted to cast a male for the role of the gang member that died, but my audience suggested having a girl would make it much more unique. I grow to love this about my trailer.

When collecting my audience feedback on my final products I used SurveyMonkey and distrubuted it to 12 members of my target audience. I shown them all my trailer and then gave them the link to my survey itself. All of the target audience said that they would go and see my film and thought my products looked proffessional but they also gave me some feedback regarding what they would change. Most of this was what I picked up on myself and would improve on looking back, however they also bought my attention to other things I would never thought to improve such as the positioning of my title in the trailer itself.

I chose to give this survey to 6 females and 6 males that had interest in crime-thrillers, this was to ensure that my results were non-bias and I was given as accurate results as possible. If I had more time and money, as a film director and producer I would ask more people to get a greater concensus of what people thought. The questions I asked were fairly open apart from the two questions that required an either 'yes' or 'no' response, but the audience responded to the open questions well when they had an opinion to share and this helped me when reviewing my work.

The question asking if I thought it represented the genre well was one I was keen to hear the responses from as this was the first time I showcased my final trailer to a group of people that had interest and previous experience of watching crime-thrillers. I was pleased with their response to this question as a whole and it seems that I managed to create a trailer that was full of both suspense but drama.