Obviously we could not have real stars in our trailer but we chose to use a younger cast- allowing the audience to connect with the trailer, therefore increasing the chance that they will see the full length film later on. We also based our idea within a 'high school' again forming a bridge between the audience and the film.
We passed out some questionnaires to find out what our audience expected to see within a trailer- not just horror trailers, just trailers in general to help us put together an idea of what it was we wanted to produce.
Trailers-Questionnaire 1
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
I need a strong idea to catch my attention in the first few seconds... you know how it is when you meet someone new, you kind of make up your mind about them with the first hand shake!
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
At the moment it is probably a bit of everything, but in order: on-line (my computer opens on the Apple homepage which has a good trailer section) followed by cinema, DVD, and TV.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
I think it has to do the business in about a minute, as I don't want to learn too much about the film, just enough to draw me in. Want all the twists in the plot to be a surprise, so please don't feed me a summary of the film as some do, which answers
How much of a films storyline would you expect to see in a trailer?
N/A
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
probably somebody scared... but what is the cause?
Trailers - Questionnaire 2
Is there anything in particular that would catch your attention when watching a good trailer?
Quite a difficult question to identify what makes a good trailer – but I expect that anything especially funny, exciting or noteworthy would catch my attention.
Where would you be most likely to see a film trailer? For example in the cinema, online and so on.
My job is to programme a small cinema so I often look online at trailers. If this was not my job, I expect that if I was making a decision about what to go and see and had online access, I would take a look at trailers as well synopses. The other location where I am most likely to see a film trailer is at the cinema.
How long would you expect a typical trailer to last?
2 minutes 30 seconds max
How much of a films storyline would you expect to see in a trailer?
I would expect the trailer to tell the story of the film in abbreviated form, in a 3 act structure similar to a feature length film, but without giving away the ending or including any ‘spoilers’.
What do you expect to see when watching the trailer for a new ‘horror’ film?
Indication of what will cause horror / terror to audience and strong sense of menace. Obviously this film genre incorporates a number of sub-genres and repeated themes such as vampire themes, slasher themes, zombie themes, demonic possession, evil children, haunted houses, cannibalism etc.
Once our trailer was complete we uploaded it to youtube ;
We then posted the link to facebook, twitter and other social networking sites in order for a wide range of people to watch our trailer. We left it for a couple of months so we could see who had been watching our film over a period of time.
This let us see which link our audience had followed, which was help full as we can determine which site/link worked out better for marketing. We can see from the list that facebook was the popular. We also know that the age group for facebook is quite young.
From this image we can see the age bracket that has been watching our trailer. We can see that the majority of our audience is female, and that the largest age bracket is 18-24. With Some people watching aged 13-17 and the smallest group being age 25-34. This was really useful as it reinforces the fact that we are hitting our target audience.
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