Marcelle- Evaluation: Q3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Overall:
Audience feedback proved really helpful as it pointed out where we can improve our products to make them more affective and regarding the postive feedback, it reassured us that our audience (our focus group consisting of our target audience) understood the message we are trying to portray. For example our audience understood what the genre of our film was clearly across all three products: a hybrid dance parody film.

Trailer:
They said in the trailer it was clear because it featured dance sequences, had exaggerated characters to make them humorous and had an appropriate soundtrack (appropriate music for the different dance sequences). This assured us that we had an appropriate narrative, and used appropriate sartorial codes and settings to evoke the idea that it was a dance parody.

However, what didn't translate was the excitement we tried to evoke during the screening. They suggested that even though we tried to reflect different moods in our trailer, we needed to make them more obvious and have a sountrack that anchors the different mood changes, emphasising the humorous aspects. They also suggested that we make sure the music builds to a climax so that there is a more exciting and dramatic ending. They also pointed out that some of the scenes in the trailer are too long, such as the ballet scene and that there needed to be more auditions to make that section of the disequilibrium more humorous and satisfying.

Our solution: In order to create that sense of excitment needed for a dance trailer, we made quicker and tighter edits to cut down all of the scenes as much as we could, so you only see the action. This made our trailer seem like it had more content, made it faster moving and easier to watch. We also added extra audition scenes to break up the ballet scene. This allowed us to be more creative and experimental, giving us the chance to add even more humorous characters to the trailer. We chose to include a heavy metal headbanger and a bollywood inspired dance in the middle of the ballet, to create a juxtoposition with the seriousness of the ballet scene. This then emphasised that the auditionees are the 'other' or outsiders, not skilled dancers that are going to help the characters win the competition. The scenes are fitting as the film is about a group of outsiders attempting to become accepted winners in society, and the additions helped to make the trailer seem again more action pact, exciting and adding humor.

The added scenes before put into our trailer:

With these added scenes it also meant we had to address the issue of music and creating different moods. We originally only had three pieces of music: the diegetic ballet and swing dance sounds and then the non-diegetic Hip Hop backing track. We tried to make our introductory piece of music more dramatic by experimenting with different synths and sounds on garageband, but ended up adding a low but loud drum beat that sounded everytime the shot changed to a closer view of the dance poster. This emphasised this was the introduction of the trailer that was going to build up to a problem. Then we added additional fitting songs that anchored the genre of music/dance that the auditionees were representing. Lastly we made our editing fit with the Hip Hop song we originally used for the ending to create a sense of suspence, speed and excitment. This made all the difference as the music was energetic enough for the ending, but this didn't translate earlier because the editing was too slow and didn't correlate well with our soundtrack.

Magazine:
On our magazine cover, our audience liked the fun colour scheme as they were mostly female and liked the image as it looked like it came out them. However, they did point out that it looked more like a newspaper insert magazine/suppliment magazine opposed to the exciting mainstream movie magazine we were aiming for. They highlighted that the background looks too formal with the white border, that there needs to be more pictures, that we should maybe experiment with different typography and improve our coverlines, because without this the magazine looks a little boring.

  We removed the border, originally it was to make the actress look like she is coming out of the page more, but found that if we enlarged her image and had her overlap with other images on the page, it produced the same effect and even made the front cover look more 3D. This is stereptypical of film magazine covers. We also pushed the colour scheme of pink and yellow more by using the hot pink to emphasise important aspects of the magazine such as the 'Independent' at the top, the 'Plus' sign at the bottom and moved the pink puff to the eyline of the actress, to make it more noticable.

We reassessed the magazines we looked at for our research and found that we only really looked at ones that have a central image, so we looked again at magazines such as these:

We noticed the magazines that have more pictures are normally all in an encased strip along the bottom or middle and often slanted to give the sense of movement. And so we mimicked this slanted strip, with screenshots from the other independent films in our class to make our magzine cover look more dynamic.

We didn't experiment with different typography because our aim for the magazine was to create a raw and simple atmosphere regarding independent films in our independent issue. However, we did rearrange our coverlines such as, making the main coverline bigger so it's clearer that it's linked to the image, moving the main coverline's tagline so it's central, making it more noticable and underlining NEED to make it seem more urgent. The main image is also carefully positioned so that her fingers are encasing the words on the strip to draw attention to them too, all to make it more dynamic.
We also used the rule of three, repeating 2012 for a forceful effect, pushing the idea that the magazine has the latest inside scoops. We also introduced the rhetorical question, 'who will win?' and used more hyperbolic language such as 'overload', 'biggest' and 'awsome' to improve our coverlines and make them more grabbing.

Poster:

Our focus group didn't have many negative points to say about our poster. They liked the vibrant use of colour, they highlighted that it presents a good mix between giving an urban feel but also channels the fun and excitement with the colours used. They also made it clear that it was interesting to look at because there are dynamic graphics, a lot of pictures and so a lot to look at. They simply suggested that we should add the Facebook and Twitter symbols at the bottom so the audience have an additional action point to go to, make the review on the poster from our magazine so it links between the two and to make our review more hyperbolic. So we changed our review from 'The funniest dance film' to the 'The laugh out loud film' to make it more appealing, added the social networking site symbols and the distribution logo to connect the trailer and poster, and changed the review being from Total Film to our magazine.