Evaluation-PART FOUR-

Evaluation PT. 4

Our first piece of audience feedback for the trailer came through the focus group screening. Through that I learnt that a lot of the audience had plenty of 'likes' from the trailer my group produced. Surprisingly, there were only a few concepts we could improve towards getting a better mark which we took on board after the focus group screening of the trailer. We were delighted when the trailer received the highest score out of the six trailers shown in class, and this really encouraged us to keep improving the trailer’s quality to an even higher level.

 

The praise which were very much highlighted in the focus group screening were in line with my own thoughts about The Possessed, that it generally felt real with quotes such as “atmospheric and jumpy” with the mise-en-scene looking natural and believable with the use of night vision looking scary. Also the focus group included the jumpy end scene which created collision cutting from tense and atmospheric surroundings to a representation of a quick ‘possessed’ monster (played by me) jumping towards the handheld camera really brought a live the trailer. One member from the focus group said “The style and pace of the end scene of the jumpy close up of the possessed monster made the end of trailer on a good impact." Another good point that was highlighted was the make-up effect on the face of the one of the characters who was possessed was good and added to the trailer and acting is convincing as it’s casual. 

The focus group helped us improve the trailer too and valid criticisms were highlighted in some concepts from the focus group screening, starting with how the "camera was possibly too shaky" and "the distorted static was possibly too much" in the trailer. I believe these two comments are good criticism but I believe in order of the style and type of horror trailer we went for i.e. handheld style (as in the Blair Witch Project trailer that inspired us a lot) it had to look realistic and that is why the camera is shaky throughout to create a sense of documentary style realism. 

 

I definitely believe our trailer The Possessed successfully appeals to a target audience of horror fans because of theinspiration we got from real-life films such as The Blair Witch Project(1999) and The Tunnel (2011) which were both handheld based films. The genre of horrors shown in all these films including The Possessed are realistic horrors constructed of tense and creepy atmospheric ideas and cinematography instead of too much body horror.
 

After the final screening the trailer improved the with the inclusion of the scene with the possessed character (myself) changing his face expression to make it more scarier as people said in the focus group it wasn’t scary enough. By making the face more distorted and mouth stretched our group used 'Adobe After Effects' to develop this technique starting with the mask tool formasking around the face. Then we changed the position on each key frame and added a colour correction on the grey face. In the final screening the focus group thought this ending scene made the trailer more impressive, and once again showed how useful audience can be if you respond to it right.