3)What have you learned from your Audience Feedback?

Favourite trailers

• Through our questionnaire given to the public we found that most people preferred the trailers of recent releases, where there was good use of tension to draw the audience in and enough suspense to keep them guessing about the rest of the film. As well as those that provoked emotional reactions, despite the audiences limited exposure to the main characters.

• From this we understood the relation between releasing enough information about a film to interest and audience, and keeping some mystery end enticement for them to then go and pay and watch it.

What influences audience opinion on characters

Shown with family

Shown with respect

Honourable

Show victorious

Family not seen

Not underdog

DisposableTo plot

HeroBad guy

Identification

• Despite many characters from the questionnaire being morally questionable, audiences still managed to identify with them or be drawn in by their character.

• This is because any developed character can be identified with, and their actions often justified or accepted as part of their character. Such as gangster characters who many would avoid in real life, yet are romanticised and glamorous for entertainment in cinema.

• This is good to know as it allows us to choose the level at which the audience can identify with out character to keep them interested in the character, or add to the mystery of the film by making them unique or odd.

Expectations• Weather consciously or not, the typical audience will pick

up on the conventions and expectations of a trailer, such as providing a setting and establishing the hook of a movie to draw the audience in.

• Most movies will also attempt to grab attention by adding dramatic scenes and key phrases that appear in the film later on, to let the audience understand some of the emotions they would be feeling watching the full movie.

• From this we could choose to follow the conventions of professional trailers from our questionnaire, and the already proved to work techniques, or perhaps challenge some of these conventions for a surprising and contrasting effect.

Suggestion

• By asking audiences what expectations they had of movies from what they had seen in the trailer, we could also understand how much of the trailer relies on suggestion and connotations of what the movie will be like later on, rather than the truth of what is shown.

• From this we could gain a better understanding of the ideas and suggestions our own trailer could make, based on the footage shown and how it is designed to appear to the viewer.

Relative genre

• We also found that each genre of film influences the conventions expected from each trailer, in order to entice the fans of that genre with trailers that appeal to them.

• Such as horror movie fans who will be enticed by dramatic tension and expectations to be scared by the movie.

• Action movies would feature shots of heated battles and a quick explanation for events which may have lead to it.

• From this we knew that we had to look into the conventions of our own genre and build the trailer accordingly.