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.
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