What have you learnt from audience feedback?

In the focus group screening, the most common praise highlighted were that people liked how the music fitted and felt that the trailer was well edited. A positive point which I agreed with was that my trailer had good "Camera angles, editing and sound effects". I had focused specifically on using uncomfortable, canted angles during the filming process and wanted to emphasise this through the use of fast editing and uneasy sounds.

The main criticisms highlighted were that the trailer didn't leave people guessing who the evil one was. Negative comments also mentioned there were a few things in the side of shots, such as feet and people laughing, which ruined them. This could especially be seen when Bex's was dribbling blood from her mouth.

I also agreed with the criticism that the "editing needed tightening in places". To aid this I cut down the length of a number of shots and put in the dissolve effect between shots. Another criticism was that the trailer was "More like one long scene than a trailer", however I chose not to do too much about this because I had purposefully made my trailer a "scene trailer" similar to The Brave trailer. Scene trailers are becoming increasingly popular and my trailer reflects that. By also including only one main scene, there is also a lot more unseen footage from The Awakening that my target audience could expect in the full film.

To overcome these problems, I cropped a lot of the shots and filled in the gaps with a couple of extreme close-ups of mine and Em's mouths at the end. The end result in the final cut of The Awakening had a lot less errors due to responding to the focus group feedback. By just deleting or adding a few extra shots here and there really made The Awakening flow more smoothly and I liked it much better after this, so was grateful for that comment.

During the final screening, the comments received improved greatly due to the changes I had made to deal with what people had criticised earlier. Some of the positives were "clever effect of chalk drawing on the floor", which I was pleased with because it had taken a very long time to film in stop-motion animation and even longer to edit each shot down to exactly the same size. There were still negative comments, such as "blonde girl's bad acting". However, considering one person in my group had left before the filming finished meaning we had to start filming all over again, and then the other group member left before editing was finished, my friend's acting skills were not my main concern.

I think of the main things I have learnt from looking at my audience feedback - especially the mixed scores in the evaluation screening - is that it is impossible to please everybody. While taking some comments on board can be an effective way of noticing things that I may not have noticed before myself, different people had different opinions on the same things. The music in my trailer is a good example of this. Some people loved it while some disliked it a lot. I think that this is representative of the horror genre and why it is aimed at a niche market. Horror isn't something neat and tidy and which appeals to everybody. It often creates a great deal of controversy, which is why I think that having mixed feedback is a positive thing.