Test Audience Feedback

Test Audience Feedback

SURVEY RESULTS

-The feedback from our audience survey gave us a number of ideas about what kind of things people would want to see in a horror film.

-Subsequently, we adapted our opening to this feedback, making sure to include certain elements, but not to conform to other conventions that would reduce the credibility of our film. 

The majority of people who answered our survey were 16-17 year olds, which is still in the bracket of our target audience. Our certificate rating is a 12, so we only sent to the survey to ages 12 and above. This made it easier to get an idea of what this teenage audience liked/disliked about horror films.

Although more people who answered this survey preferred not to watch horror films, they would still be useful in telling us what they disliked about them and what could be done to make them more appealing. 

The people in our survey watch horror films fairly regularly, giving us a good idea of the variety of these films they had watched, so as to pick out the kind of things that drew them to them. 

When asked 'What interests you about the horror genre?', the top two answers were suspense and clever plots. We also thought these were essential to have in our opening, prior to even developing a storyline.The supernatural and blood/gore were lower down on the list, and since we had decided to create a psychological horror film we were not planning on including these elements. 

We found that 71% of people who answered our survey preferred the psychological horror genre to the paranormal or graphical type. This was ideal as we wanted to create our opening fitted to this subgenre as it was the one that intrigued us the most. 

A number of responses to the question 'What is your favourite horror film?' resulted in many psychological horror films such as 'The Shining', 'Silence of the Lambs' and 'Shutter Island'. This strengthened our motivation to create a psychological horror opening. 

When asked 'What do you like about this particular film?', many people referred to 'twisted plots', 'tension' and relating to 'reality'. We tried to incorpoate these elements in our opening, giving it an edge when compared to graphic films. 

73% of our surveyers thought that a 15 certificate would be best for a typical. However, we felt as our film does not contain anything violent or gory, and is more focused on psychological aspects, that a 12 would be more appropriate. 

The majority of people expected 'suspense', 'tension' and 'well thought out jumpscares'. Again, we made sure to include this in our opening. We created suspense and tension through long, drawn out silences with the faint murmur of eerie music over the top where nothing sinister happens, paired with unpredictable jump scares, created with glitches. 

When asked what they disliked about horror films, the response of our audience was 'bad story lines', 'predictable elements', 'tacky jump scares' and 'excessive gore'. We tried our best to avoid all of these elements, keeping the jump scares to a minimum, and not including any gore as it did not fit in with our genre. 

We found this survey incredibly useful with helping us to create our opening. We adapted many aspects from the audience's answers in order to help us achieve a successful and well-liked clip.

LUNCHTIME SHOWING

We showed our opening to a group of people that were aged 16-18. They completed a sheet that allowed us to understand what was considered effective and any areas that need improvement. 

Genre:	Effectiveness and what was done well:	Improvements:
Horror	Use of non-diegetic sound	Transitions Duller colour
Horror	The sound used; kettle and intense music The first appearance of masked lady	Transitions
Horror/thriller	Sound; kettle and phone call	Transition  Editing
Horror	Costume of masked figure Shot angles to show discomfort	Perhaps face on show instead of mask
Thriller/horror	The phone call voices Panning shot	Make it more jumpy Duller colour
Horror	The part where Evie is washing her face and the figure appears behind her	The sound; walking downstairs
Horror	Camera angles Sound effects	Abrupt ending Flow more Bit more jumpy