Raye Douglas - Q3 What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Initial Audience Feedback     Production Feedback       Evaluation Feedback

Trailer

We first interviewed a few people when showing them two trailers: 'Trainspotting' and 'This is England'. We wanted their feedback on the genre and asked them questions about things they liked and things they didn't. After this we came to a decision that we would choose the genre British Realist Drama and with locations though it could be about a teacher. After deciding this we interviewed a focus group of student teachers. We showed them the trailer for 'Happy Go Lucky'. We found out that they didn't like how the plot was unrealistic to a teachers lifestyle when showing her at school. As we wanted to make the story 'realistic' and truthful to a the representation of teachers we made the story-line more simple and focused on the real struggles of teachers. I feel we successfully showed realistic struggles of teachers for example showing her marking work, struggling with students and asking for help.

When choosing shots to add to the trailer we have two ones we liked from a scene of Flora and Conor laughing on a bench however when we asked a focus group in our media class which one they thought
we should add they suggested we cut them both. I felt this was a good decision as the shots were too messy in the background or the laughter looked forced. 

 We then re-filmed the shots after setting up the camera and choosing a 4 second clip from a 4 minute shot. This gave us the shot we wanted as it was realistic fitting our research from the focus group. This also hinted at a possible romantic relationship between the two to fit a larger target audience as most said they liked a sub genre of romance. It made our original genre change slightly but i thought it worked well as it gave the audience a bit more interest to watch the film.
I feel like our audience feedback had a huge influence on our final product. The most effective research was the focus group of teachers asking what they liked in a Drama about teachers- feedback straight from our target market as we then knew what ideas to have for shots to convey a particular kind of lifestyle.


Film Poster
( ENTER PHOTO OF POSTER)
Our group showed a film poster of 'Happy Go Lucky' to several people who the majority said they liked the cartoon like title as it reminded them of a school like theme. After this feedback we made our title on our film poster a cartoon like font. This made the title look like a logo so therefore was easily recognizable and when we wrote the title on our magazine we could use the 'logo' for our film.

During audience feedback they also said they would have liked the cover star in the 'Happy Go Lucky' poster to be a cartoon. We tried to make this effect on our poster however decided it didn't fit our genre as well and could look too cartoon comic like.

We got our class to analyse our poster when we were half way through the process of it. They didn't like the photo and thought the background was too messy for a film poster. On Photoshop we then blurred the background and kept floras face in focus bringing the attention on her and altogether easier to write headlines on a clearer background. This reminded me of the 'Happy Go Lucky' poster and i liked the outcome of our poster after we blurred the background. 
I think the feedback we recieved from the magazine was mixed. Some thought the film genre was clear but others thought it was slightly american and was a Romantic Comedy. This could have been from the bright colours used in the photo and the fact our central character was very attractive hinting that she could be attracting someone in the film. To imporve i think we could have had a photo of her with not such a yellow background and less make up on making the audience have sympathy for her.


Film Magazine
(ENTER PHOTO OF FILM MAGAZINE)
Our audience preferred independent magazines 'Little White Lies' and 'Sight and Sound'. They liked the simple look of the covers and the simple portraits of the cover stars on magazine 'Sight & Sound'. They also said they liked the way the masthead was not straight across the center. We applied this to our magazine cover and it gave it a more sleek sophisticated look that would appeal to an older audience. This worked well as our target audience is 16-50 years old.

We asked AS media students their opinions on our magazines. We didn't tell them the genre of our magazine cover as we wanted a truthful uninfluenced answer. They said our original masthead made it look very posh and simple which we liked however looked like the style for a make up magazine. We then changed it to look more like an art magazine rather than a mainstream lifestyle magazine. I preferred the masthead for our final idea as it looked like it suited our genre more and could be easily recognized as a logo. The brush stroke of the font makes it look more artistic. The red font gave it a more classic look and all together made it less mainstream and more independent.
I really like our final product. I think our headlines reach ou taget market of young women and men perfectly and the feedback from our masthead made us change it for the better to look more artistic.
Over all i am very pleased with the feeback we have got from our poster. The biggest comments were on the photo of our cover star as it was done with an SLR camera and lighting and a background that looked very professional. It was clear and direct.
(ENTER PHOTO OF FLORA - THE CLEAN ONE FOR THE MAGAZINE)

Raye Douglas - Q2 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Raye Douglas - Q1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Flora Clarke, Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Flora Clarke, Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Initial audience Research

Film Trailers

We started off the whole process by deciding our genre, it took a while to warm to a British Realist Film but in the end we found it was the best one for us. Originally we started looking at films like Train-spotting and This is England and did got lots of audience feedback which we filmed and posted on the blog. However, from this we understood that had we made a more 'actiony' fast paced trailer it would have attracted a younger mainly teenage audience and we wanted a broader audience that could fit many ages.

We took a focus group of teachers and showed them two trailers.

Our focus group was four female student teachers which helped a lot seen as that was the main character in our plot. We took a lot from them and they were helpful in all aspects of production, for feedback, inspiration and ideas.

Our audience was mainly female at the beginning of production so we added a male character so that the male part of our audience could relate to him. In the beginning we thought about making him gay but we realised this would make our audience ever more prominently female.

Our focus group we women in their early 20s but we wanted to branch to a larger audience. We wanted people as young as 15 to be able to come to our film. We wanted to be able to have the freedom to include strong language and in the beginning we thought we might wish to show the main character being severely depressed so we made our trailer certificate 15. In hindsight it needn’t have been so high but it seemed like the safest option at the time.

During the interview our focus group told us that they wanted to see more films about teachers that told the truth about what life was really like. This made us think that there weren’t enough film about real teachers out there and so there was a potential ‘gap in the market’. 

Action Taken

Happy Go Lucky

•  Didn't get an understanding of the plot so we used lots of mainstream formal conventions to make ours more understandable
• Didn't hear the music we -we made ours loud throughout but kept the beat down so as not to distracts from the rest of the trailer
• Found main character un-relatable and annoying –tried to make our character more relatable

Overall they wanted to see some sort of progression within the trailer. We then added this to our trailer by ordering the shots to make it appear as it life gets better for our main character.

Another year

• Enjoyed the ‘true-to-life’ plot –we tried to mirror this in our own trailer, keep the film independent helped us to do this as the idea of a low budget made us have to cut back on things like after effects.
• Characters seemed like real people –we wanted to get people from many different walks of life so we tried to make this clear. However by concentrating on this our film has now come across as quite racially narrow. In the trailer none of the main characters are black or Asian.
• Each character had their own plot line which made it more interesting –we tried to make it appear as though each character had more to say each of them had their own life that they had their own problems in, this was another way of keeping in true to life.

Overall this film came out best so we decided to shape our film around this trailer yet make it approachable to a younger audience with changes to the plot.

Film Posters

Our initial audience research showed us that most of our target audience go to the cinema to watch films so we created a theatrical poster.

Our audience research showed us that films that mix of animation and real images drew in the most audiences for our genre. We showed our focus group two posters- 

Our focus group told us they thought, the 'cartoony' elements made the characters seem in their own little world. However we didn't want to make our film feel in anyway ‘childrensy’ so used our original image and blurred the background, the writing on top of the image was the part that gave our poster the more animated feel.

Our focus group loved the bright colours and easy to read writing on the theatrical posters for ‘Life is Sweet’ and ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’. However they didn't like how the reviews were on the top section of the poster. We took all this into account when designing ours, using bright colours and a font that stands out but we made our reviews smaller and less prominent as our focus group told us that the reviews are not what would draw them to go and see a film of this genre. 

Magazine Covers

The majority of our audience preferred the independent look of magazines like sight and sound and little white lies. They wanted a magazine that focussed more on the arty side to films and wanted to be able to get a grasp of character from the picture.

We showed them two covers for independent magazines and asked them to tell us their likes and dislikes of both:

Likes:

• Portrait shot of the character focusing on expression
• Just a few subheadings to get an idea of what was inside the magazine without having to read loads
•  Some sort of ‘puff’ attracted them to read the magazine
•  The bright colours of banner
•  The banner being small- meant they could focus more on the actual image

Dislikes:

•  The black and white image- although they liked the shot they told us that the bleak colours wouldn’t attract their eyes if it were on the shelf
• ‘Clint Eastwood’- they wanted the film title to be the first thing they saw and not the actors name.

Likes:

•  Again the portrait image was popular
• They liked that fact that the eyes, despite not being a focal point to the cover, were very bold and drew them into the image
•  The banner links into the colour scheme without overshadowing the image.

      Dislikes:

• The writing covering the face was hard to read
•  They wanted to be able to see a little more clothing to get more of a sence of character
•  The cartoon like image made them feel as though the film was animated, all of them having seen black swan they said that had they seen this cover before hand they would have been less inclined to see the film
•   Despite not being much writing it completely covers the image which made them feel claustrophobic- they needed more blank space

From all of this we had a few key things we then knew we should include and disclude from our cover; the writing, not a lot, need to be positioned where it did not ditract from the image yet still your eye was drawn to it. Th image needed to be close up yet still give a sense of character using codes of clothing. The banner needed to be to the side and not too big but still be something that your eyes would be drawn to look at.

Flora Clarke, Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Flora Clarke, Question 1: In that ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Trailer

Magazine Cover 

Poster

CANNES SLATE

This was a slate i made on photoshop and added to the trailer. When asking people is this kinds of reviews attracted them to go and see the film the response was incredibly positive. Therefore we chose to add this into the trailer as a three second slate.

FILM POSTER FONT

When testing out a font for the film poster we decided to look at the website 'dafont.com'.

All three of us have decided we wanted to make the title a logo so it would be recognisable and the font would be relatable to the film. This also means we can put the title on the magazine cover as a recognisable logo.

 

FILM POSTER- audience research

As part of our audience research we asked people what they thought of this film poster. As this films main character is a teacher and part of the story line is about her teaching we wanted to use this film poster as a template. The biggest response we got was that they really liked the cartoon like title. Our group agreed with this and thought the font gave the film a logo - you would be able to recognise the font and connect it to the title. When we asked them about the photo some said they would find it interesting if the woman in the photo was edited as a cartoon character however some said they liked the fact she was in focus and was surrounded by the cartoon-like background. We now think we will experiment with both ideas of turning the photo into a character and keeping it in focus. We also want to try and make the title to our film a cartoon like font but we will experiment with it. Most agreed that the mini reviews at the top were missleading however the stars were something that attracted them as it was less personal. All people said the the 'Cannes festival' reviews were something that attracted them to the film. We asked 6 questions to the audience. Here they are:



1.       Do you like the bright colours used in this this poster?
2.       If you were to guess the genre what genre would you say this is?
3.       What age range would you say this movie is for?
4.       Do the quotes saying ‘Cannes festival’ and others attract you to the film?
5.       Do you like the combination of cartoon and real images on the poster?
6.       Do you think the mini reviews are misleading?