EVALUATION!! - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout my research and planning and also the production of my media products, I found that having feedback from our target audience was extremely important and useful because this reassured me that our teaser trailer and my ancillary tasks would be successful when released. If I didn’t get feedback from the target audience then all of my media products would be a waste of time as they wouldn’t sell because they won’t appeal to anyone. I have made sure that everything I have done, I’ve got regular feedback from focus groups etc. The 'Triangle of Dependency' is suggesting that the institution, audience and text are all interlinked with each other. Research is done to find out what the audience want from the text, the text is then created to fit the audiences needs from the research that has been done. For example, if something changes in society to make the text not popular anymore then more research will be needed to find out what is popular again and to make the text fit the audiences desires. Also the audience influences the institution used because like our film, we chose to have an independent company make our film because our audience don't want any special effects etc so it wont be an expensive film to make. However, if we were making a Horror film then the audience would want to see special effects and would probably want to see famous actors so they know it is going to be a good horror film; meaning it would be best to have a well known institution to give the audience that trust they need to watch the film. The institution influences the text because if you have a large institution like 'Warner Bros.' then you are limited in what guidelines the film has to follow. There is more freedom in an independent institution. The 'Triangle of Dependency' will influence my film teaser trailer because all my decisions are based on the research i have done and have come from my target audience and their feedback. This way i know that our film will appeal to the right people that we want it to appeal to. In this case, the institution has not influenced our film because we made it up for out teaser trailer but i have done research into existing institutions and independent institutions to show that if we were to make this film, our institution would fit in well and would be recognisable as a film company because we have stuck to the codes and conventions of the existing independent institutions. Before our group made any decisions on what genre our teaser trailer would be, we undertook some primary research (questionnaire) to find out what the most popular film genre is today. We already knew we wanted our target audience to be of a fairly young age so we didn’t ask anyone over 40. However we hadn’t decided on male of female yet so we asked both and we knew that we may want to make our age range a lot smaller but we still wanted to ask outside the box to find the most popular genre. Our questionnaire results showed that the most popular genres of people aged 15-40 are Thriller and Romance. We then had a decision to make as to which genre we felt most comfortable with. I felt that I knew most of the typical conventions of the Romance genre as this is my favourite; having discussed it with the rest of the group, it turned out that this was their opinion too. The questionnaire also enabled us to form a target audience of women aged 15-25 as this was the age that the majority of people go to the cinema and watch a romance film. I also undertook secondary research (searching on the internet at other existing Teaser Trailers) in order to find out the typical conventions of a Romance teaser trailer. Following these decisions, we decided that we needed to undertake some more primary research from our target audience when we were creating our storyline and synopsis. We created our storyline from the ideas that the previous questionnaire showed our target audience typically found in a Romance genre. As a group we then decided on a ‘twist’ for the storyline. This will help keep our target audience ‘on the edge of their seat’ when watching our teaser trailer. I also thought of other Romance films that had a twist to make sure that we weren’t in danger of diverting away from the genre. If we hadn’t have asked our target audience what they thought of our initial synopsis then we could have been creating a storyline that no-one would be interested in. This shows that the audience had a big influence on our storyline. Throughout the making of our teaser trailer and the making of my website and poster, I have realised that audience feedback is vital to have when producing a piece of media text. For example, when we were creating our synopsis, we did several drafts and kept on showing them to a focus group of people from our target audience and they then gave us feedback on how to improve the storyline to make it more enjoyable for their age and gender. Without it, it would be possible to create something that wouldn’t interest anyone making your product not successful. To ensure that our group got plenty of audience feedback we made several questionnaires and used focus groups and class discussions to help us stick to the typical conventions of a Romance genre film. This research helped us with the editing, what clips to put in and take out (e.g. taking out the ‘standing up’ scene and adding in more happy clips at the start), mise en scene and also made sure that our teaser trailer made sense, (because our first synopsis was too confusing for the focus group.) I have realised that in order to create a successful media text, audience feedback is vital; it makes sure that the text meets the correct codes and conventions of your genre and it also makes sure that your products fit the needs of your target audience. The approach that we used was the ‘Spiral Effect’. This means that when you have an idea, you undertake audience research, then change the product to fit the needs of your audience and then get some more audience feedback to make sure your product is the best it can be. For example, there are many ways in which audience feedback allowed us to improve my products like the synopsis (as I’ve mentioned before) and the editing (taking in and out clips), making sure my website fitted with the romance genre e.g. colours (red – connotes love and romance, white connotes purity and black connotes darkness and evil, relating to the drugs), text, images (creating the right messages).