Evaluation Question 3 - Seyi

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Collecting Feedback

Our teaser trailer was aimed at teenagers to young adults, so people within the 15-24 age group as we knew that this type of production would grasp the attention of young people, so we launched our first method of acquiring audience feedback which was presented in the form of an essay. We used SurveyMonkey In our survey we gave the participants nine questions about all aspects off an Urban Drama trailer, ranging from questions about the music all the way to questions asking about the type of protagonist they would want to see. By posting the link on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook I managed to compile a total of 66 responses which were enough to compile a good amount of data telling me what aspects of Urban Dramas makes them appeal to them.

The questions that we took on more on board than others were the ones that had a direct impact into the type of trailer we were going to make, for example a question we created asked how intense they wanted the stereotypes of the characters to be, we felt this would be an extremely important question as there are many different types of Urban Dramas, some which exaggerate the stereotypes of Urban London e.g. Anuvahood, ones that stick to the reality of the situation e.g. Kidulthood and some that move away from stereotypes such as Top Boy so in order for us to fully understand what type of Urban Drama interests the viewers things like this needed to be clearly established in order for us to create it.

The audience swayed towards the concept of using an accurate use of stereotypes so we ensured that nothing within our production was too eccentric e.g. using weapons not available to young people in London. We consulted the participants of the survey about the type of music that they thought would be effective within the trailer as within Urban Dramas music is an extremely important tool which is used to set the tone and pace of the trailer. The participants chose the ‘Fast paced grime music’ option, grime which is a genre of music specific to Urban areas of the UK was a perfect choice as in order to keep the trailer centred around Urban Culture.

YouTube Comments

Our other sources of audience feedback was YouTube as we used it to get feedback on our first draft of our trailer, so we encouraged people who watched our trailer to leave comments below on the effectiveness of the trailer, what they believed the narrative was and which shots they found most effective. We received a lot of positive feedback on our first draft which was far from finished, this feedback included comments that stated how clear it was that it is an urban drama and also that some of the video effects used were effective for the genre e.g. a black and white effect that we placed when the protagonist was sitting at a bus stop. Also the viewers commented on the effectiveness of the locations we used which shows that our extensive location scouting proved to be very effective.Statements that showed us how to improve our trailer included how the ending of the trailer was extremely abrupt, which caused the trailer to appear as if it has come to an anti climax, as it builds up so fast and ends so quickly.

Improvements

When we assembled all of the comments together we began to change our teaser trailer accordingly, our ending shot was changed from a extremely low angle shot of the protagonist stomping down onto a victim to an aerial shot of the protagonist on the floor.
In the YouTube comment above we see that some of the main criticisms included the typography of the title, issues with a shot at the start where the protagonist is in a room with his mother and also issues with the aerial shot of the protagonist on the floor.


 Firstly we removed the typography from the start of the trailer completely and took the advice of the YouTube comment and changed the typography of the title completely by giving it an eroded effect. Secondly we received criticism on the aerial shot of the protagonist on the floor in pain, a comment we received stated that the shot was way too light to appear menacing, we soon went back within our editing process and altered the lighting of the shot, making it appear darker overall, using the conventions of the colour black e.g. mystery and danger to aid our teaser trailer. Finally also trimmed and sped up a few of the shots at the beginning e.g. the shot where the protagonist is in a room with his mother of. because some of the feedback indicated that these shots were too long and made those shots look too staged.