Evaluation - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From our questionnaire we learned that the most popular genre was comedy (58%), with the three following most popular genres being related to high tension films (Horror, thriller, and action). We learnt from this that our audience values entertainment highly, and that the combination of action and comedy genres could be the best solution to attract the widest audience. We also learned that the audience regards the narrative as an important aspect in a film, as under 'favourite film and reasons why', 5 votes for the reason why were due to an excellent storyline. We therefore considered focusing upon narrative over humour, but as we were developing a trailer rather than a feature-length film, we decided that the narrative required less attention as we could expose the audience to enigmas and leave them unanswered.
It is important to remember, however, that the results of our questionnaire are likely to be biased. 71% of our participants were male, meaning that our results can generally be applied to males with a good degree of validity, but not to females. We therefore learned that we needed to take greater time considering both genders during the development of our trailer, to ensure our product was not male-orientated and to expand our target audience to everyone.
The age range of our participants could also be a cause for bias, as over half (51%) of those who took part were within the 15-20 age range. As this was also mine and Gareth's age range, we learnt that with this added information we were best equipped to target this age range as our audience.

As we displayed our trailer in front of family and in class, we received some feedback personally. One person told us that were slightly confused as the indoor scene started (36 seconds in), as there was no build-up to that scene and the audience is just 'thrown' straight into the scene. We could understand this point as the thief does just enter into the room with no prior explanation as to how he got there. However, we did have such a scene which showed the thief breaking into the house, using the 'swoop shot' technique that we had practiced beforehand. Unfortunately we had to cut this scene from the finished production, as when we reviewed the shot we decided that the camera movement was too unstable (due to having to avoid mise-en-scene such as wall hangings and a bookcase) and did not look professional when compared with the rest of our scenes. We therefore learned that if we were to repeat the process we should try to use a raised track, to keep the camera stable and at the height that we wanted. We would however need to ensure that the enigmas displayed were not solved within the trailer, just clearly defined, to provide the audience with a greater understanding as to why they might want to see the full film.