Question 3:

Q3: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback played a vital role in the production of Indelible as it allowed us tailor our film to what our target audience find appealing in a horror film.

We targeted our film to the age group 15+. We aimed our film at teenagers and young adults of the demographic group E and D. We chose to target teenagers and young adults, as they’ll be aware and educated about current social issues. In terms of psychographics we targeted reformers, strugglers and explorers. Reformers are socially aware and they’ll therefore be aware of the issue of FGM. We targeted strugglers as they seek to escape and this could be through engrossing themselves into our horror film. Lastly we targeted explorers as they seek discovery and experience, this can be through viewing our film, also as they value difference our film will appeal to them as the issue of FGM has not been addressed in past horror films.

The first audience feedback we had received was on our pitch. At first my group and I had chosen to have a narrative where the protagonist goes through a spiritual sacrifice by a supernatural demon. However, our target audience had stated that this narrative was very typical and that they had seen it over and over again. They suggested that we make the issue in our film more current and modern, which is why we chose FGM. We chose to put across this idea in our film for our audience to interpret it instead of us directly showing it. This applies to Barthes Semic code.

My group and I had conducted research using Survey Monkey. Each member of my group had their own questionnaire which we had asked people of our target audience to answer, each survey had a different topic. For example we had a survey on what our audience prefer in horror films, another on films poster, another on film narrative and the last on radio trailer. Through splitting up the ancillary tasks and conducting a survey on each aspect we were able to gain qualitative and quantitative feedback. In the first survey we had asked the audience what sub- genre of horror they preferred, a vast majority had said that they liked supernatural and psychological, this helped us decide the subgenre for our films and influenced us to create a hybrid subgenre of both supernatural and psychological. In our film poster survey we had asked our audience what was their current favourite horror film poster and why. Responses showed that Sinister and Annabelle were the most the popular, both posters use quite dark colours and some stated that they like the doll in the Annabelle poster as it is quite ominous. From this we decided to incorporate dark colours and feature a doll as the primary image in the poster as majority also answered that they would prefer if the doll was the primary image on the poster. We furthered research on posters as we took to Instagram to ask our target audience which horror film poster they like and why. Again majority answered Annabelle. We chose to use Instagram as it is a popular form of social media used by people of our target audience. This was also a means of accessing our audience.

In our narrative survey we asked the audience if they prefer when normality is restored at the end of a horror film or its left unresolved. 60% answered saying that they would prefer the film being left unresolved. This influenced our decision to end the film on disequilibrium. Our film therefore challenges Todorov’s equilibrium theory as at the end of our film Madeline hints to the audience that FGM will be repeated on the new girl Samantha. We also asked our audience whether they like when a horror narrative is based on a conflict in society, 80% had answered yes, further reinforcing our decision to base Indelible on FGM. Horror films in the past and currently always paid homage to either political or social issues, for example the film Purge 2013 addresses and raises awareness of the overcrowded prisons and corrupt government.

 In the survey we carried out for the radio trailer we asked our audience whether or not they like sound effects in a horror film and if so what sound effects. 88% had said that they like sound effects in a horror film and screams and laughs were the most popular as it ‘makes the film scarier’. In the trailer we also added diegetic surgery room sound effects to create an enigma for the audience as they will contemplate what type of surgery is taking place. In both the film and radio we added whispers of the words ‘purify’, ‘innocence’ and ‘sin’. We did this as we wanted to hint to our audience the intention behind the FGM and abuse was to purify Madeline of sins and to preserve her innocence.

We also used Survey Monkey to ask our target audience which tagline they liked best for our film. We asked them which tagline they thought would go best with our film, Indelible. From this we learnt that ‘ It’s a chain of events’ was the most popular, however, my group and I had decided to alter this slightly to ‘It’s a chain reaction’. Through the use of social media platforms such as Snapchat we were able to gain audience feedback on our production logo. Using snapchat we had posted a number of possible logos that my group and I liked best, we then asked our audience to screenshot which logo they liked best for Grimm Productions. From feedback we had learnt that the most popular logo had 7 out of 11 screenshots, we then made this our logo.

As part of research my group and I had conducted an ethnographic study, this allowed us to gain an insight into what our target audience find interesting in a horror film. We chose the film Split as it is a psychological horror film that was recently released in 2017 and similarly it has a young teenage girl as the protagonist. The film raises awareness of mental health problems and social issues in society which made the film realistic for our target audience and therefore they found it more frightening. Our target audience are also able to sympathise with both the antagonist and protagonist due to their age and the fact that the antagonist is a victim of a mental health disorder. Likewise in our film we decided to have a young girl as they protagonist, however, we decided to change this and make her later become the antagonist due to the abuse she has undergone. This is an example of preferred reading as the audience will respond to the product the way we as producers want them to.

We also got feedback regarding our film script and poster from our target audience. We gave out post it notes and got our audience to write what they think about our poster, we then made improvements. The feedback from our script was useful as it stated what they thought was good about the script and what they thought could be improved.