Screen Test: Audience Feedback

This post explains how we showed a rough draft of our film opening to some members of our target audience in order to receive helpful feedback.

The purpose of a screen test is to gain audience feedback about our work and see if their are any improvements that can be made. We decided to use google forms to create a survey to share with our audience because it is a convenient way to get information without wasting time finding people around the school to interview. A link also allows our group to reach people outside to school without going to another school physically which is convenient.  Here are our questions:

What do you like about this horror movie introduction ??

What are your thoughts on the characters of the movie ??

What can we improve on ?

Which movie title for this horror movie ???

if all of these feedbacks were implemented in this movie opening would you watch the rest of the movie ?

If in the previous question your answer was no please explain your answer ?

We chose these questions because we wanted to understand our audience's dominant reading on our characters and how we could further make this movie introduction interesting to the point where our target audience would watch the whole movie. We showed the clip to 3 members of our target audience to ensure that the feedback we receive is appropriate and it was "horror" enough and suit their expectations. We also provided title options to them so the title wouldn't sound "cringey" or "weird" but suit the whole premise of the movie. 

Finding people for the screen test was quite difficult for me especially because most of my friends or people I know don't watch horror movies in general so it's hard for me to distribute this survey and get useful feedback from them. Luckily my teammates Max and Bamz do have friends who are horror / adrenaline enthusiasts as such we were able to get 3 people to answer the 6 six questions. 

Here is the draft that we showed audiences for the screen test:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aZNoa5TS_LFWem8HayxCq2i23cp7k_I0/view?usp=drive_link 

Here are the results from the audience feedback:

• What do you like about this horror movie introduction ??

• What are your thoughts on the characters of the movie ??

• What can we improve on ?

• Which movie title for this horror movie ???

• if all of these feedbacks were implemented in this movie opening would you watch the rest of the movie ?

• If in the previous question your answer was no please explain your answer ?

From the feedback we learned that we need to make our movie deeper, which means add more story / foreshadowing in the movie intro so they would be more interested. Another said we need to add context, it makes sense since the movie introduction is unfinished and our editor hasn't added any scene that moves the plot forward and the context / information on each character and their traits and what will happen. The dominant reading of the character were mysterious which is concerning as each character in the movie introduction should have different somewhat dominant readings than just "mysterious". The last thing they touched on is the fact this movie introduction leans more into mystery than horror. It's great constructive criticism because we can make that happen via editing and honestly after reviewing the footage again I completely agree. 

We are going to change the font of the title and add blood splatter animations to make it more horror filled. We might add more red to the introduction as a semantic code for death and destruction. The music can also be changed to more eerie and "ritual" like non diegetic or diegetic music so the movie can be more recognise as a horror movie. For the context part we can tell our editor to stitch up the important parts to add description into each scene and also add more depth to each character in the scene. 

This screen test was a useful part of our process because we are able to fully understand what the audience's preference so they could be intrigued into watching the whole movie. Even though the introduction's editing isn't finish and our editor left many parts behind leading to some of the criticism some of them made us change some parts of our movie so it can greatly improve. 

Reflection: This screen test made me rethink what a good horror movie should look like and allowed me to critically think of ways to improve like what the audience says. I think we could've ask more in depth answer to further understand their preference but overall this really helped our project.