Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
There are many different aspects that will help the success of a film, but in reality the audience itself is what decides on the success of the film. Throughout the production and development of our film we had a very clear idea on how we wanted the feeling and emotions of our audience  to be. The word of mouth that can be transmitter between our audience and their friends and family is what we had to focus on, we had to get them to love it for them to be confident enough to talk about it as a great short film. This is where we realised the importance of acting upon the feedback we received from our audience.  

After producing our initial treatment for our film we decided that it was time to get some feedback from the desired audience and work the feedback into the original ideas to further improve  our short film.
We produced our first audience questionnaire and handed it out to a total of 35 people and as well we posted it online on the social media website (FACEBOOK). We gained a lot of positive feedback on our film, but we also received some constructive criticism which helped us with the development of our short film. We took each piece of constructive criticism and used them to further improve our film to the point where we were very satisfied with the film we had produced. We could also figure out from the questionnaires whether or not our film had a big enough target audience for us to release it to. Customisation was essential when feedback was received (For example: Shorten down shots so the film doesn't drag on and get boring). Many questions were asked after they read a short extract and a basic outline to how the film was going to be. For example 'What genre would you generally watch?' and 'Do you think our film fits the majority of your age group?' etc. 

Another use for research was filming a random 10 people, after letting them read a short extract upon there request we would sit them down in an interview manner and allow them to answer question we read out to them. We had a major technical fault with this part of our audience research as the tape that we recorded our interviews on broke and we only could save a limited amount of the interviews we did. This wasn't a major problem as we did get all the answers to the questions and wrote them down. We asked people if they could think of any other films that the story line we had created linked to and if it was sufficient enough for the genre and target audience we had chosen. Several candidates explained that they like the sense of mystery about the thriller and that it makes them want to know more about what happens to the characters throughout the duration of our 5 minute film. 

  All the information we collected from the interviews and questionnaires was used to produce our 5 minute film. Although we had a lot of footage to handle we couldn't use most of the footage as the shots proved very difficult to record so didn't work to their full potential, even though the shots didn't work we decided to produce a film out of these shots to show others, but we would never use this to publish as our final film. As many students were respectful and told us that they worked but were not necessary we decided to get rid of them all and create a short version which ended up being around 4 minutes 30 seconds long. They highlighted the very specific parts that didn't work so that we could produce a very clean and nicely cut first draft. 

We got feedback from many different people including close friends and family which helped us to obtain an outline in which we needed to follow to produce a very successful film. Facebook and YouTube were very helpful for feedback as we got comments on both of the sites telling us ways in which we could improve our short film. 

i think that the audience feedback that anyone receives can be very easy to totally discard and to my experience i think it would be a grave mistake. As the producers, you can let the role overwhelm you and think that you know best. But in fact it is critical that you listen to the audience feedback as it will dramatically improve the quality of the product you are deciding to release. 

To conclude i believe that the feedback that we gained has been vital to the success and quality of our short film, without it the film would not have been anywhere near as good as it is as its final export. Possibly more boring and very graphical if we were not told to cut the scenes out that did not suite our audience.