Evaluation: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to make more sense of our audience feedback, I sorted each quote we recieved into a general category, then creating a pie chart from these categories. I think this helps discern more easily what parts of our trailer the audience liked and disliked.

Close analysis of responses

• Oddly enough, the category that received the most amount of likes were the effects, most notably the intertitles. At the very least, this shows that we were utilizing this essential convention of documentary horror in a noticeable way. Those who liked the intertitles paid particular attention to the way specific words in the intertitles flickered. This is a good example of how a simple effect can be used to make these shots more interesting. Those who disliked the intertitles said they either "could have been longer" or "were overused, became tedious". It's probably true that we used too many of these shots.
• The category that received the most dislikes was the cinematography. However, the cinematography also received a lot of positive feedback. This was to be expected. Documentary horror is a divisive sub-genre; not everyone finds a shaky camera and suggestion of monsters more threatening than actually showing the monsters and gore. With that said, most of the criticism accused us of abusing the techniques of documentary horror and not bothering to put in any jump scares. But of course, it we showed all the jump scares in the trailer, what reason would there be to see the actual film?
• The music was praised for fitting in well with the rest of the trailer. This shows that our gamble of using royalty-free music instead of composing our own on a program like GarageBand worked well. However, I feel that perhaps we should have edited the track to decrease the length in order to create a trailer that didn't drag on as long as it did. The music was also criticized for being too similar; one of the perils of using music made by someone is is that you are stuck with their work.
• Feedback on the narrative was undecided. Some said the storytelling was good, others said the narrative was lost in the muddle of the "build-up" shots and the villain wasn't shown clearly enough. It's certainly true that the monster is what draws many to watch horror movies. However, Blair Witch Project did well enough and that never showed the monster at all. We tried to emulate this film and create an atmosphere of menace and tension where showing the monster wouldn't be necessary.