To answer this question, I will refer to both pre and post production research and planning that we conducted as a group. The pre-production research pointed us in the right direction, and allowed us to cater to our target audience more successfully, and the post production allowed us to see their responses, and how we would possibly do things differently if we were to do it again.
When we began planning our trailer we had specific goals in mind. We set these out into 3 main points:
1) Leave our audience feeling scared and tense.
2) Make a trailer that makes people want to go and watch the film.
3) Make a trailer that people are genuinely impressed by.
Firstly, we had to research exactly who our target audience is and who we should aim our products at. To do this we looked at official statistics from the British Film Institute. This data gives us a better insight into what kind of person actually watches horror movies - a mix of both males and females aged 15-25.
Now we knew what our target audience was, we went about achieving our first goal- to leave our audience feeling scared and tense. To achieve this first goal, we researched what kind of horror category scares our target audience the most. We created a simple questionnaire:
We posed this simple question to 32 people of both genders aged either 17 or 18 years old. As you can see by the results, Paranormal horror films are the scariest among the teens of today with 17 out of the 32 of them (that’s over 50%) find this category of horror films the scariest. This can also be supported by the fact that the majority of horror films released nowadays are from this category (Sinister, Insidious, The Conjuring, Poltergeist, to name a few), so clearly the market is leaning towards this category at the moment. We also noticed however, that 7 out of the 32 people questioned (that’s 22%, or a fifth) found psychological horrors the scariest.
We found this very interesting, as in psychological horror films, such as The Blair Witch project, the audience practically never see anything scary, but it's all in their heads. We realised that with a budget of practically zero we would benefit greatly from using this kind of horror to scare people as we wouldn't have to shell out on special effects or lots of props and costumes. This, plus the fact that this category of horror is apparently popular with a significant proportion of teens , made out choice even easier.
This questionnaire also helped us achieve our second goal. "make a trailer that makes people want to go and watch the film"- we reasoned that if we successfully make a professional looking trailer, and people actually enjoyed watching horror movies, that those people would go and watch our film if we were to release it. We made this even simpler questionnaire to see what proportion of these people actually liked going to watch horror films.
So we decided as a group that the 2 main areas of focus that our trailer would have would be paranormal, and psychological. This meant we needed a story line based on a ghost or demon or spirit of some kind, but also leave a lot to the viewers imagination, as in The Blair Witch Project.
After we had taken our research and applied in to our production, we had a finished trailer. We had 1 goal left to achieve -"to create a trailer that people were genuinely impressed by".
To help decide if we had done this or not, we created a survey to give to people after they watch out trailer, in order to get good quality, honest feedback on our trailer. This also aided us in answering the question to this evaluation-specifically the "what did you learn from them" part.
We initially made this survey, which was quite vague and limited. It contains some good questions but after giving it to 2 or 3 people we instantly realized we needed a more specific section that asked their opinions, so they could actually give us specific feedback in their own words rather than just ticking a box.
After seeing the problem with this survey, we altered it slightly and made a new survey. It had a specific section where people could write positives and negatives as well as any improvements they had for us. This gave us a much better view of peoples thoughts on the trailer, and we saw some patterns and common answers.
We decided to put our survey data into graphs and charts to better see our results, as it is much easier to make decisive conclusions when you can look at data in this format rather than on separate pieces of paper.
Firstly we have the demographics of the survey participants, e.g. age and gender:
As you can see by this pie chart, 50% of the people who did our survey were 15-17, while 25% were 18-20 and the other 25% were 21 or over.
As you can see by this pie chart, 50% of the people who did our survey were 15-17, while 25% were 18-20 and the other 25% were 21 or over.
Furthermore, two thirds of the people who took part in our survey were girls.
Finally we looked at weather or not people would go and watch The Door at the cinema. 6 out of the 8 said yes, and only 2 said no. That means 75% of the people who watched our trailer would go and watch it if it came out. Of course some of them may just be saying this to be nice so the data may be a little exaggerated but even so, this is conclusive evidence that we achieved goal number 2, to make a trailer that would make people want to go and watch the film.
Audience Theories
As part of our Media Studies A level, we have thoroughly studied theories about audiences. This meant that some of our choices weren't influenced directly from people we asked, but from generalisations and ideas that can be applied to audiences to gain an understanding of how they work.
Uses and Gratification Theory- Blumler and Katz (1974)
According to American media and communications theorists Jay Blumler and Elihu Katz, audiences always have a reason for consuming media. Here are the 5 possible reasons in their theory:
1) Surveillance- to gather information and to gain knowledge. (e.g. a documentary)
2) Personal Relationships – to gain satisfaction through socialising with other about said media product (e.g. a TV series everyone is talking about)
3) Personal Identity- the ability to compare your own life to the lives of the characters in the media product. Gain satisfaction from the knowledge that other people are like you are (e.g. tenn comedies such as The Inbetweeners)
4) Escapism – to escape everyday life by immersing yourself in another world or just to distract yourself from other aspects of your life. (e.g. Sci-fi, or fantasy worlds such as Harry Potter or Star Wars)- people like the idea of there being alternate worlds where they like to imagine themselves living, and also enjoy watching other people live in those worlds.
5) Superiority- to make them feel like their lives are better than others. To make them feel better about themselves by looking down on other (e.g. Shameless)
This theory very much affected how we produced our trailer. We had to give our audience a reason to watch our trailer. If they could not see any of these above reason in our trailer then they would most likely see no benefit to go and watch it.
Our trailer definitely fits into the "Escapism" category, as it is an alternate world in which ghosts exist and can posses people. Although is more dystopian than Utopian, it still gives people that escapism they need to get away from every day life. Furthermore, we believe it fits into the "Superiority" category as well, because when our audience sees out protagonist in a bad situation, it makes them realise their problems aren't as bad, and that they are actually OK in life. Arguably, the "Personal Identity" category can be seen in our trailer too, we tried to make out protagonist, Adam Black, as close to a modern day teen as we could. He is 18 years old, wears jeans and a t-shirt with a hoodie and we wanted to make him seem like an everyday teen with the same problems as everybody else. This gives our audience someone to relate to and empathise with.
Hypodermic Syringe Theory /Bobo doll experiment- (1961-63)
Albert Bandura is a Canadian psychologist and philosopher who performed the Bobo Doll experiment in 1961 and 1963. On several occasions he put a child in a room with a bobo doll and nothing else. For some of the children he just left them alone and told them or showed them nothing, but for other he attacked the bobo doll for no reason with weapons and with his fists and feet. The general result was that the children who saw him attach the doll also attacked the doll, without being told to, because they believed they should. The children who did not see him attack the doll also did not attack the doll, as they had no reason to and they believed it was wring to attack something with no reason.
This lead to the hypodermic syringe theory- people are impressionable and will often do as they see others doing- "monkey see, monkey do".
Of course this is a sweeping generalisation as not all the children attacked the doll, and furthermore this was a small act of violence, much different to attacking say a person or an animal. And of course these were children, who are definitely more impressionable than adults as children are still learning right from wrong, and they often think the things they see are the things they are supposed to do also.
This played into our trailer as well, as we didn't want our trailer to cause any psychological harm and change the way they behave. This is the main reason why our trailer is rated 15, as we believe 15 year olds ate old enough to make moral judgments and decide weather or not things are right or wrong, regardless of if they see others doing it or not.
Conclusion
In my opinion, our trailer was a huge success. Our 3 initial goals were all achieved, and our final products were met with great feedback. It's very reassuring to see such great reviews of your film, and although there is some constructive criticism, we took this all on board agreed with our audience and appreciated that our trailer isn't perfect but we believe it’s a very good end product for a piece of A level coursework.
