Evaluation question three

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From the results of our audience feedback questionnaire we were able to gain view on how successful our media products were and what needed to be improved. Perhaps most importantly it allowed us to know what was our target audience, age and gender should be.


For gender there was a vast difference between who viewed our media. It is clear from our results that females are more attracted to the romance genre than males and they generally gave more positive feedback than the questioned males. But we must consider that our sample was fairly small and would not be generalisable. However we are awake by our own knowledge that on average women enjoy romance genre media more than men.

Our results for age was far more varied and we discovered that romance films are appreciated by a wide range of ages. Our target audience is females around  the age of 15 and over, but we should specifically target professional women 25 and over as these are the people who are most likely to have a surplus within their income to spend on leisure activities such as going to the cinema and reading film magazines. So we should make our products appeal to them to enable us to gain a big profit from our products.




The questions asked in regards to the film trailer were:

• With 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest, how well do you think our trailer fitted the romance genre?
• How would you rate the camera work?
• How would you rate the film overall?
• How would you rate the choice of setting?

Considering our questions about our romance trailer we mostly received positive feedback, getting mostly 4s and 5s out of 5. Unfortunately when asking if the trailer fitted the romance genre we received feedback of two people rating 3 out of 5 which is only regarded as satisfactory. Because of this we are aware that there is some room for improvement in this area. We wanted to know what we could have done to improve so following the completion of the questionnaire we asked the respondents the reasons for their low marks.
When asking the two people the reasons for their 'satisfactory' grade, the reasons were:

• 'It wasn't romantic enough. There was just not enough 'love' involved, The film seemed to be based too much around Alice's life without George rather than there relationship together.'
• 'It seemed to fit more in the genre of drama. Although there was love involved in the storyline, the main theme was George's death.'

From this feedback we discovered that some participants thought that the genre of romance was too broad for the trailer. However, we need to consider that we decided to make our genre a sub-genre of 'romance-tragedy'. We are now aware that we should have worded out questionnaire more specifically and when we asked the two respondents the same question but replacing 'romance' with 'romance tragedy' they both gave a rating of 4.

We received all 4's and 5's for our camera work, with the majority giving us a 5. This showed us that our camera work was viewed as an excellent standard. Even though we were pleased with our rating of 4 it was the lowest rating on that question we asked one of the participants why they rated it a 4 and not a 5.

• 'I didn't like the hand held camera work. Although I can understand why it was used, personally i just don't think it fits in well with the romance genre, it's too scary and reminds me of horror films that have used that technique. However,  all the other camera work was great, and i would have given it a 5 if the hand held was not in it.'

We felt that this response was based around personal experience rather that the specific camera work and they thought that the rest of the camera work was worth a 5. However because they have seen other films that they have been frightened by using this particular filming technique they have linked this to our use of it and still find hand-held camera work uncomfortable to watch. 


We hadn't thought of this when deciding to use this technique as it didn't occur to us that people would make this link. Even though we were aware that it was used in horror films including 'The Blair Witch Project' and 'Paranormal Activity' we thought that romance was a vastly different genre and with the use of romantic conventions people would make a link and it would be a refreshing use of the technique.

Below is a comparison of screenshots of the horror genre and our romance trailer when using the hand-held technique.

Paranormal Activity 3

The Blair Witch Project

Our trailer 'Until The End'

We only included one question regarding the magazine cover in our questionnaire as we felt that along with asking the participants the reasons for their answers, we would receive enough feedback. 

We asked:

How well do you think our magazine cover fitted the romance genre?

We received mostly 3's and 4's for this question, and although we would had preferred higher marks we only had limited resources to analyse to gain knowledge on what conventions were of a romance magazine cover in real media would be.

When we asked the participants who gave us 2's and 3's why they had done so, we discovered the main reason was being able to acknowledge what in involved in a magazine cover. The respondents informed us that they thought the magazine cover looked professional and followed the conventions of a normal magazine cover, they were unsure whether it would conform to the convention of a romance magazine cover. They gave us suggestions on how we could improve it by making the romance genre more obvious, like by including George with myself in a loving embrace on the front cover (however we didn't want it to be too similar to our poster) or that we should have used more romantic themed colours.

We found that we had done a reasonably good job for the magazine cover, however as we were not clearly aware of the conventions needed we were not able to produce it to the best we could. We could have made the romance genre more obvious by including George on the cover but we had already used a similar picture for our poster and we didn't want it to look the same. We also didn't want our romance theme to look too extreme and risk looking tacky, which could put the audience off from buying it. 


We also only asked one question about the poster in our questionnaire:

How well do you think our poster fitted the romance genre?

                                                                                                        

From our results we found that we did a good job for our poster, with getting a majority of 4's which is a good rating. When we asked the respondents the reason for their 4 rating they said that it was clear that the film was of a romance genre. This is because George and I are in a romantic embrace with a quote below the title. The reason why they didn't give us a rating of 5 was that they felt we could have made our poster more simplistic and that there wasn't a need to include all of the additional writing on the poster.

Getting audience feedback was a highly important part of our project as we were able to use other people's opinions/potential audience's opinions on what we did well and where we needed to improve. We received a good response and we feel that our feedback tells us that we did a fairly good job, particularly on our film trailer and the poster. However with our magazine cover there is still room for improvement however if it would be released into the real media it would be included in the rare few that currently exist.