Question 3 of the Evaluation - By Joe Blissett

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Firstly, we aimed to target our product at a rough demographic of ages between 17-25, and I would mostly say aimed towards males rather than females. This is predominately because of the fact that the genre we tried to create was a thriller type genre, and so males are stereotypically more into these kind of films compared to females... however this does not mean that we only aimed our film towards males, as many females that responded to our audience feedback, liked the idea of our film too. 

 

To make sure our products would appeal to our target audiences we tried to include different conventions of the genre-type so that when the audience would come to watch it, they could recognise the film as being part of a thriller genre. This included using low key lighting in areas that were used to build up tension as well as using a non-diegetic soundtrack to portray the same ideas. 

Audience Feedback from social media

During this process, we collated numerous amounts of audience feedback about the early stages of production, including ideas about the title of the film as well as ideas into using editing techniques such as slow motion in important areas to add emphasis. Below is a couple of examples. 

This example shows that the majority of people liked the idea of 'Advance to Go'  for being the title to a Monopoly-based film, however this particular result also shows that some people were unsure about the idea behind it - perhaps they did not know enough about the overall plot or storyline behind the film; something that we could've improved in doing when doing it next time. 

This screenshot of the question asking whether our audience liked the idea of using a timelapse in order to portray acceleration in the film and to make it less boring, came out fairly positive. 77% of people said 'Yes' they liked the idea behind it, with an equal share of 11% both either said 'No' or 'Maybe'. This suggests to us that much of our target audience would be happy to see this used in our film, and so from this, we progressed through and used it numerous times during our film. Click here to see an example of a timelapse, similar to what we used in our actual film..!
Even though this question produced us with reliable and good answers, I still believe we could've possibly asked other questions about different ways of accelarating/decelarating time, as this would give our audience the chance to think about what would work more effectively for our specific film. 

This survey question showed us the initial thoughts about our idea of our film following the same kind of structure seen in popular film 'Jumanji'. An overwhelming amount of people (66%) said that this would be a 'Good' idea, with 22% saying that it was a really good idea and 11% saying that it was a bad idea. This result shows that the majority of people liked the concept behind it, however the 11% that didn't like this idea may not of been familiar with the film 'Jumanji' and so could not see where we were coming from. However we did not want to change our idea as we believed that if it worked, it would look really good, and so we wanted to take that risk.  To make this particular question more reliable, we could've explained in slightly more detail what we meant when we trying to compare our ideas with that of Jumanji. This could be including the idea of a sci-fi type genre, or simply what our audience thought would help us achieve making a film that could be similar to Jumanji.

We got this data from a popular survey website 'SurveyMonkey', which allowed us to create our own questions using a template from recent surveys. I found this incredibily easy to use and by publishing the link of the survey onto social networking sites, it allowed our target audience to easily comment on our ideas. This helped us a lot as it gave us some initial feedback on what our demographic thought of any basic ideas to start off with and so we could grow our ideas from that!  

Below are comments from various friends and family that have watched our short film via a link on a social media post. This is what they had to say..!

                                                                         

All of the comments above are very useful in terms of overall thoughts about the postive and negatives of our film. I especially liked the final comment as he described each element in steps, and so from this we can easily see what needs to be improved as well as what went well. 

From this audience feedback, the overall feedback is that some scenes weren't clear enough in portraying what had gone on, as well as there not being enough emphasis on particular shots that portrayed something significant, such as the transferring of money into the character's bank accounts. 

In order to improve this, I believe we could re-film certain shots so that the audience would have a better understanding of what had occured, instead of them becoming confused about certain areas. However about from this, I believe that most of the respondants understood the main points from the film, and would be able to explain what had happened in the storyline, which is positive news as that is ultimately what our main aim was. 

One of the comments quoted in saying at how the audio didn't seem to be that clear, perhaps hinting at the fact that it was taken directly from the camera, however it was not. It was infact taken from multiple sound recording devices, however when it came to editing, we found that not all of the sound was that clear as well as the fact that the sound was only coming out of one speaker and so we had to adjust this during post production to try to rectify this, but clearly it wasn't as well thought out as planned. To improve this aspect, we should've listened back over each sound recording after we had recorded so that we were all happy with what we had got. 

A couple of the comments was to do with the actors being a little 'robotic' which we were aware of at the time, however the people we used in the film we obviously not actors and so to be a part of our film voluntarily was good credit to them!

Overall, however, the main feedback is positive yet constructive, which is useful as we can see how our target audience thought our film went.