When creating a teaser trailer, it is important for us to get audience feedback. Firstly, we decided to use Survey Monkey which is an online survey tool. In this survey we asked people a set of 9 questions so we can get their thoughts on which sort of trailer appeals to them the most. This is so we can create a target audience for our teaser trailer in order to get the feedback from them. By looking at the audience feedback we took into consideration that their first choice was psychological horror and supernatural horror. In this way we developed on our ideas and started researching on black swan and the omen. Finally our main idea was Yangshen, which is a supernatural horror. We gave our trailer a unique element by making our protagonist a Buddhist. This is where the name Yangshen comes from which means ‘sacred one’. Then we thought about having a monk in our teaser trailer in order to show it to our audience that the protagonist really is a Buddhist. In order for us to develop more on this idea of ours, we filmed a several scenes with the Buddhist protagonist and the Buddhist monk. Then we asked everyone’s opinion on our cinematography, mise-en-scene, sound and mainly the storyline.
After showing a few scenes, a few positive responses were;
“the location and the setting choice fits in well with the story line”
“I really like the ariel shot of the protagonist and the monk”
“the use of characters such as the monk is a good idea”
“lullaby from the ring fits in well with the trailer”
The negative responses were;
“the lightening could have been better”
“the storyline isn’t clear”
These feedbacks made us change our idea slightly due to poor storyline. I believe that the storyline was quite weak with the monk in and we couldn’t come to a conclusion on how we would combine the two different scenes together such as the one where the protagonist is trapped in the house and one where she is praying with the monk. Keeping the audience feedbacks in mind, we decided to stick with the idea of our protagonist trapped in the house as being a spirit. This whole idea appealed to our audience the most.