Evaluation 3 - What have you learnt from audience feedback?

Audience feedback has been crucial to the overall effectiveness of my short film. Throughout the whole process I have adapted and changed my ideas from what my audience had to say. In order to receive the most effective feedback I targeted an audience of the same age range and demographic that I was aiming my film at, which was males and females between 16 - 29.

Pre-Production

My first major part of audience feedback was during the planning stages of my film, where I was able to skype with a professional film director. He first suggested to always be filming, and catch the mistakes made on set. This allowed me to watch inspirational movies and appreciate the shots that were not meant to be. Furthermore, Terry Hall also contributed feedback to my idea about effortless filming her dancing from multiple angles. He suggested using Match on Action shots, and to film her hundreds of times. For Example, I watched 'Take Me To Church - Sergei Polunin" - Where they have captured his dance so beautifully, yet the camera angles changed a number of times. I tried to replicate this.

Production

Later on in the process during production I got frequent feedback from my peers. For example, when I was constructing the flashback shots, I asked my peers about how effective they thought each one was, and from there I cut and added certain shots into the narrative.

Another key element of audience feedback I received during production, was when filming my parents arguing, I needed them to argue for real so it looked authentic! I used a typical married couple, of the working class/ lower working class region, and gave them a very controversial topic to argue. Then from this I filmed them having the debate. The debate was "Women belong in a kitchen" - This sparked outrage when I told my uncle to debate for. 

Post-Production

After editing the film completely, I showed it to a focus group of 39 people of my demographic to get some feedback. I asked them to fill out this form after watching it:

Here are some graphs I have created from my feedback:

In regards to the sound - I was very happy with these results as I spent tireless hours blending music, however, I can also understand the array of response, as the blending was not fully perfect. So I improved my soundscape by adding more tracks and more foley sounds, such as the sounds from the cars driving past, and also the sound from the chocolate bar wrappers. This created verisimilitude and made my film more convincing. 

Again, quite an array from a score of 6 to a score of 10, nevertheless it's hard to condense a film into 5 minutes. I am goinng to re-edit some scenes thanks to feedback question 4, such as I refilmed the dance scene to match the music.

From the pie chart it can be seen that 10, 9, and 8 are fairly evenly split, this is because the lower masks came from the fact I used a setting from my school, which was noticeable to the students. Plus my protagonist actress was a friend to the girls at the school. Nevertheless this worked in my favour as they knew she studied drama, therefore believing her acting.

These were really helpful, as people that provided feedback, commented on the things I knew or didn't know where as good as they should be! So I'm happy with this feedback. 

Over all I'm happy with the feedback, as it gives me an indication as it helped me improve my film, and a confidence booster of what went well.