Grace Suiter - AS Media Studies
Audience Feedback
11th February 2015
Katie and I decided that the best way to get audience feedback on our thriller opening was to conduct interviews as well as to show our thriller opening to a focus group who can then say what they do and do not like about our thriller opening. If we ask people verbal open questions, then we can get a more honest response which will help us improve our thriller opening as opposed to people just saying what they want us to hear. The focus group also allows us to identify which parts of the opening the focus group enjoy purely by their facial expressions and body language.We can also see if they are intrigued throughout and what parts we can change to improve it.
The interviews are a more formal way to get responses because the interviewee's can say as much as they want and this is much more helpful and detailed. We asked a variety of different people.
1. Katie Greenwood
2. Ryan Thompson and Josh Obisanya
3. Chris and Karen
4. Lewis Haynes and Ross Beart
We decided to interview these people because they fit our target audience and it gives a younger perspective as well as an adult
perspective. They all had different opinions as to what they like, however they all seemed to enjoy our thriller opening.
Response Analysis
Katie Greenwood:
1. Really good and really enjoyed it.
2. Good setting and really creepy.
3. When the clown kills Emily (the main female character) and then the face appares on the camera on the end shot.
4. They're clear and split up in the right places.
5. Really like it, really good.
6. It could go many ways, perhaps back in time or go ahead in time, maybe kill someone else.
7. Defintely really suits it.
8. No improvement.
Katie basically really enjoyed the whole thriller opening and didn't suggest any improvements.
Josh Obisanya and Ryan Thompson:
1. Ryan: quite good and scary
Josh: Sent chills down his spine and it was surprisingly good.
2. Josh: Yes it does fit the genre and the whole mood fits the genre
Ryan: The lighting and soundtrack allow it to fit the genre
3.Ryan: The ending when you see the shoes standing by the victim and then the clown face appearing on the camera prop and Josh agreed this
4. Josh: The credits were the highlight for Josh and it was edited brilliantly.
Ryan: The font and colour were appropriate.
5. Ryan: The Soundtrack made a massive impact
Josh: Eiry and it was more of an instrumental piece as opposed to a soundtrack.
6. Josh: clearly a very mischevious character and there is clearly going to be more deaths in the future.
7. Ryan and Josh both said it was very dark and a good setting which means that our original audience research was good.
8. Josh said that he would like to see more because it was quite captivating and really attracted his attention.
Chris and Karen:
1. Karen and Chris both said that is was very atmospheric and spooky
2. Both agreed that our thriller opening does fit the genre
3. Chris' favourite part of the opening was when the clown appears whereas Karen's was when the establishing shot took place (the filming of the trees horizontally)
4. Chris said she found the credits slightly distracting but then once she understood that they had to be there, she didn't find them distracting. Karen didn't find them distracting.
5. Both Karen and Chris liked the soundtrack
6. The girl which gets seperated from the rest of the group is the main target however there are murders to follow.
7. Both Chris and Karen thought that setting was appropriate.
8. Neither of them thought there were any improvements to be made.
Lewis and Ross:
1. Ross found our thriller opening very suspenseful and nerveracking and Lewis found it good too.
2. Ross said that the clown character fit the genre therefore the whole opening did too.
3. Ross said that his favourite part of the thriller opening was when the clown appeared behind the trees whereas Lewis said he enjoyed the part where the clowns face was on the camera.
4. Ross thought they were very appropriate at the beginning as well as throughout the opening scene.
5. They said that the soundtrack added to the suspense of the opening.
6. Ross said that the clown clearly killed the girl but Lewis thought that the clown was on the run from the girls.
7. Ross said yes because the woods fits the genre because its scary.
8. Ross said that perhaps the final shot should be an extreme close up of Josh's clown face and this will scare the audience.
Conclusion of Interviews
Overall, our interviews were extremely positive and they all seemed to enjoy our thriller opening and were at least slightly scared which was the overall plan for our thriller opening. It's also good because it fits our genre of phsycho thriller and this means that it must make the audience feel concerned for the protagonist character and fear the antagonistic character which is one of the conventions of a phsycho thriller. The majority of the interviewee's said that they liked the soundtrack and thought that it added to the eirie atmosphere which was created and this is good for our group because we wanted to make our opening as spooky and suspicious as possible. However, we would still like to add some natural sound which we deleted in the rough cut but we think that the natural crunching of leaves or natural whistling of the wind may add some effect as opposed to it all being non-diegetic sound. We were also pleased with the credits but one discrepency with the titles would be that they looked small when we were editing them on the small screen, but then on the big screen they occupied a large percentage of the screen and so we would like to make them smaller. However, most of our interviewee's didn't think they looked too big but we can experiment with both and see which look more professional and less in your face. All of our interviewee's also thought that the setting was appropriate which is also encouraging feedback because it was all set there and if they said no, then we would be in trouble because it wouldn't fit the genre or the brief which we were set.
Focus Group
23rd February 2015
Katie, Tommy and I organised the focus group and set up our thriller opening on a big school interactive whiteboard which made it easier for our focus group to see. We all went and asked individuals if they would mind being in our focus group and this resulted in these five people being involved:
- Josh Smith
- Elliot Green
- Ben Watts
- Billie Krauss
- Niamh Sarson
They were all very helpful and answered our questions well and gave us some good advice as to how to improve our thriller opening. However a small minority of the feedback which we have been given, from both the individual interviews and the focus group, was not that helpful because it was to do with the filming process, like adding extra cuts and making it a bit longer. However this is extremely difficult to do because the editing process had already began. Nonetheless, the large majority of the responses were helpful and will defintely help us improve our thriller opening.
The Focus Group were all very good at discussing their ideas and all said that they enjoyed our thriller opening which is encouraging feedback.
Q1; Everybody seemed to enjoy it and this is positive feedback because we obviously want to appeal to our target audience which was mainly young adults. Billie is scared of thriller films but decided to watch it regardless and she said that she was very scared. This is again good feedback because if somebody who is genuinely frightened was scared of ours, then it means that we have met the conventions of a typical thriller opening.
Q2; Elliot liked the suspenseness of the thriler opening and the fact that it was tense. Niamh liked the music which we included in our thriller opening. We found the music especially difficult to find and so for someone to comment and say that they liked it, is very positive feedback.
Q3; The whole focus group said that the thriller opening made them feel scared and that is the whole purpose of the genre. This again is positive and reitterates what the interviewee's from the interviews said.
Q4; The whole focus group said that they would make the thriller opening longer, however this wasn't a helpful piece of feedback because we had already done our filming and it was too late to backtrack and re-do and add in extra cuts. However if we had of
had the time to do extra filming, it is defintely feedback we could've considered but due to our short time-frame, we were unable to do so.
Q5; Billie said that we had a good choice of music and everybody in the focus group said that it was a good choice and it fitted well with what was going on in the opening. Elliot said it could be slightly tenser and Josh agreed with this statement. Katie and I therefore added another soundtrack which was quite crescendo and this should hopefully add to the tense atmosphere of the thriller opening.
Q6; Everybody liked the titles but Elliot thought they could appear a bit better; with the use of fades. Katie and I will therefore try and understand how to insert effects however, it looks like quite a difficult task but if it will improve our thriller opening, we will try and improve them.
Q7; The focus group thought that the last cut was slightly dark however this is due to the natural lighting which was naturally quite dark. When we were filming, we took spotlights with us however this didn't seem to brighten up the shot. Similarly, when we were editing our first cut, we added lighter filters however this looked extremely grainy and unprofessional and so we stuck with the darkness and we thought it looked mysterious, especially with the added sound of crunching leaves.
Q8; They said we could improve the soundtrack by making the music faster when it becomes tense and we found this difficult to do because it sounded high pitch and lost its mysteriousness.
Q9; Elliot said that we could have the titles appear in different places but we did do this originally and so this wasn't something we could change. Everybody else thought that the titles were the perfect size but Billie thought they were slightly squiggly. However she was the minority and everybody else thought they were fine. This means that we didn't feel the need to change them because everybody else liked them as they were.
Overall,