Eli Entertainment

In order to make some improvements to our trailer before the finished product, we showed some of our audience a rough cut and asked for some feedback. We provided them with five multiple choice questions:

1. What methods do you think we could incorporate to our trailer to make our meaning clearer?


Voice-overs /Dialogue Text Additional Footage

Other (please specify)

From this question we found that 70% of the audience believed that adding voice-overs or dialogue would help to make our meaning clearer. From this question we also discovered that adding additional footage would be effective within our trailer. Therefore from this we were able to improve our original plan. We added in several more scenes, each with dialogue or voice-overs in order to help explain the narrative of the film.

2. What style of music would best represent the genre of our trailer?

Choral Electric Drum and Bass Symphony Other

We had mixed responses for this question due to the changes in tones throughout our trailer, therefore the audience reflected on the fact that the music helps to illustrate the particular mood that is being created. Due to the theme of mermaids within our text, many of the audience believed that choral sounds would symbolise these characters the best, due to the stereotypes of singing. When presenting this to our audience, there was no music and therefore they could establish what they thought would be best. For our final text, we used a range of styles throughout. As our genre is a hybrid, post-modern fantasy, there doesn't have to be a specific style throughout. Therefore we used a mixture of choral, symphony and drum & bass as these helped to build suspense where necessary and were also the most popular responses from our audience.

3. Do you believe the title of the film reflects the tone and narrative of our text?

Yes No

From the question we established that 90% of our audience believed that the title of the film reflects the tone and the narrative. When creating our title we struggled to decide the overall theme as the trailer does not completely reflect the overall tone of the film, due to it only being a teasers. Therefore we followed the traditional colours and text that would be stereotypical of mermaids, blue and white. The background used is also a 'bubble' effect, symbolic of water. As the majority of our audience thought that this reflected our trailer well, we decided to keep this title. The name of the film 'The Mermaid's Myth' is very simple, however effective as reflects the narrative of our text.

4. Do you believe our props have been used successfully?

Yes No (if no, please state why)

80% of our audience stated that our props were used successfully throughout our trailer. This meant that they helped to create meaning and illustrate the narrative clearly. However, 20% stated that editing could be used more clearly in order to highlight the importance of each of the props. Although this was only a response from a small proportion of our audience, we wanted to improve this in order for it to be effective for everyone, as we believed that our props were a significant element of our trailer. Therefore, we added some slow motion effects on the necklaces in order to successfully present them in a fantasy theme.

5. Which aspect of our trailer needs improving?

Use of text Use of transitions Length of trailer

Use of effects   Overall narrative

When showing the audience our rough cut, the trailer was shorter than they would expect to watch and therefore 70% of them responded saying that the length of the trailer needed improving. By adding additional footage (which was an improvement that we discovered from question one), the trailer length increased. Also, many of the audience believed that the overall narrative needed to be improved through the use of editing and sound. By adding music and dialogue to our trailer, our overall narrative became clearer.