Looking at real life examples

The police will try to investigate situations occurring to find out who is actually doing it. They will be intimidating and determined to find out the answer. Whilst trying to get a clearer idea of what to actually do in the horror trailer, I looked for an example horror trailer which may help guide me. The horror trailer I looked at was the Sorority Row (2009) trailer. I found that many of the concepts in this trailer matched what I aim to see in the end product. As well as this the characters were also similar; a group of young girls, a victim (even though she was not bullied), etc. the idea of ‘coming back for revenge’ was also included.

What creates a successful horror trailer?

I have carried our research my looking online for what makes a good trailer. Here I have created a mind-map of some suggestions I found.

Prelim Task- Short Trailer

Target Audience Research- Online Survey

The second piece of target audience research I decided to carry out was an online survey. With the questionnaire, I had been able to gain feedback from mainly students within my college, however to target the wider population I thought that the internet would be a useful tool. I created an online survey on a site known as ‘Survey Monkey’;

After I had created the survey, I used social media to publicise it so that people respond to it. Twitter was the site that I used as I am aware of how common it is. In another tweet that I posted regarding the survey, I used the hash tag system to increase the chances of people seeing the tweet. 

After the survey had been filled out, the data was collected;

The findings were very helpful. Although it was unplanned, most of the feedback was from the age range I also targeted my questionnaire at, so it was almost like a back-up for my previous results. I found that on an average, most of the participants watched between 0-3 horror movies. I feel that due to this reason it is important for the trailer to be eye catching. If people only watch an average of 3 movies in 5 months, companies have to make sure that there is something special about their trailer/film, and I will have to keep this in mind. The move trailers should not be too short and nor should it be too long. It should include the important points of the film rather than giving the whole story away. Also, the story line clearly attracts audiences. I will be able to look back at these findings in the future to refresh my memory and remember what a trailer should be like/consist of.

Target Audience Research- Tally Chart (Quantitative)

I had already carried out a qualitative research method (questionnaire) however I thought it would also be interesting to add in qualitative method too. For this reason, I decided to create a tally chart. I approached individuals within my college between two different age ranges; 14-16 and 17-19. I asked them close-ended questions and calculated how many of them answered ‘yes’. 

Findings show that the older age range that I targeted were keener on watching horror. It seemed as if the younger age range group were not yet ready to watch realistic horrors such as possession movies. They were also not so comfortable with 3 minute trailers. This could be due to their attention being distracted quicker than the older target group. The older group seemed to also be a lot more attracted by a horror depending on what it consists of rather than who I consists of. They also paid more attention to media aspects such as sound (diegetic and non-diegetic) as well as editing.