Evaluation Question 3

Once we had finished our main product (the trailer) and other groups in the class had aswell, we had a screening of our finished trailer this was so we could exchange audience feedback (as we are part of the target audience for horror films) This was an enjoyable process as it was exciting to see others reactions to something our group was very happy with when we had finalised it.

As a result of receiving our informative audience feedback we were glad to see the positives outweighed the negatives of more than 2:1 but we were also without meaning to sound arrogant not hugely surprised as we had invested a lot of time on the planning and post production stages of developing our trailer.

Here is a selection/generalised view of the positivities of our trailer:
- Isolating sections of the intertitles e.g vanishes
- Final title "Crash Site" worked well, looked professional
- Smoke and Font on end title was very fitting
- Good static effects on shots
- Wide range of shots
- Conventional setting
- Monster from the past (plane crash and mask)
- Music works well and picked up during horrific scenes
- Pov shots distorted and almost black and white

These comments echo the effort we put into our planning for our trailer, we had stuck to a decent amount of horror conventions, for example the low light shots and the degrading of quality as so it matched our idea of a documentary style horror film similar to that of the Paranormal Activity series we further enforced this with the static effect and fuzzing of certain shots adding to the construction of the tension we wanted. We also kept to a conventional setting that being the woodland/swamp area.

One thing that was focused on which I didn't entirely expect was that the music seemingly was well received, although I thought it was "ok" considering we didn't have an orchestra like real horror films where they produce their own score for the film. We were left to a difficult task of scouring through royalty free music sites trying to match our trailers pace to that of the music, I still feel as though we did well all things considered but it would have been nice to use copyrighted music as I feel it could have added a tad more "spark" to our trailer.

The negative comments were as follows:
- Could be more jumpy sections
- Was only a couple of jumpy parts
- Inter titles could have been longer
- Narrative lost with all the different build up shots
- Music was fitting but could have differed at some points
- Not enough close ups
- Too much running shots, not a lot happens
- Pov was over used
- Intertitle effect was maybe overused became tedious
- The home video look made some areas unclear

"Could be more jumpy sections
Was only a couple of jumpy parts"
This is what I feel our main weakness of our trailer was that there wasn't enough shock/"hide behind hands" moments. When planning we had a few shock moments which we envisioned as being incredibly professional (As you would) the problem with some of our shock moments was that they were not easily viable and therefore ended up being "watered down" this meant we only had one truly shock moment. This is something I'd certainly want to rectify if we were to re-make it.

"Inter titles could have been longer"
I thought that the inter titles were of a satisfactory length as they were only a sentence or so of information I thought it helped the overall flow of the trailer by keeping them at a reasonably short length, obviously it's easy for me to say this as I was one of the people editing/deciding on the text to include on the titles so it was reading what I expected, rather than it be for the first time like the audience. I'd agree that the film/production company titles were maybe a bit too quickly flashed up on the screen but I'd say this fits in with almost every horror genre film trailer as it's a highly exploited genre you have to sell your film on the basis of the story you tell in the short amount of time in the trailer so I'm glad we focused on that rather than the length of the titles.

"Narrative lost with all the different build up shots"
I can see where this persons comment comes from as I was involved in the whole process of this trailer it's easy to fill in any gaps that the trailer might not explain, I understand we did not show enough of the monster to show what the audience should be scared of and also explain more on what is happening. I feel as though it's difficult to find the line of where to tell enough of the story to entice the viewer but to hold enough back to make them want to see it, I think we may have got the balance slightly off. The way in which our story was told (flashbacks, the past etc) did attribute to the fact it was slightly hard to follow although we did receive comments that suggested we told the story interestingly and well.

"Not enough close ups
Too much running shots, not a lot happens
Pov was over used"

First comment I'd agree with, we included a fair amount too many medium-long shots. Second comment I agree with elements of it I think there are too many running shots this was mostly due to us not wanting to run out of shots, I'd like to go back and cut out some of the build up as I feel like we dragged it out too much. Third comment the reason we used pov shots as much as we did is because it is a low budget documentary style horror film, there are many great horror films that are shot only on a "handy" cam for example The Blair Witch Project highly regarded as being one of the best horror films ever made.

"Intertitle effect was maybe overused became tedious
The home video look made some areas unclear"

Reasons why we used the inter title effect as often as we did is to create a sense of house-style throughout the trailer. The home video shots were deliberately altered to make them look like a lower quality camera to tie in with the whole effect we went with for the film.

All in all I feel as though we created a very good trailer with someone we came up with from scratch, but with the audience feedback I think I would want to certainly change some of the elements of our trailer I'd want to cut out some of the less interesting parts and replace them with some fast paced shock moments to help with the overall cinematic feel we clearly desire.