Advanced Portfolio Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learned from audience feedback - Jake Woolven

Advanced portfolio Question 3 - What have you learned from audience feedback?

Audience feedback is a form of communication between the film makers and members of the audience during the production stage of the film. Audience feedback is used so that the creators of the film can get an insight into how the target audience are perceiving the film. They use this information to make changes to the film which would make the short film more appealing to them. When creating our short film, we had a target audience of young adults ranging from 17-25 and got feedback throughout the production stage which helped us improve our short film.

When getting audience feedback, there is numerous ways to get it such as asking face to face, surveys and using forums. We got our audience feedback by creating a Group chat on Facebook messenger consisting of 10 individuals from our target audience and sent them our short film. After they watched the short film, we asked what they did and did not like and discussed possible changes.

With this feedback, we made adjustments and rendered out key parts to see how the changes would affect the film, we then ran them back through the target audience to see if it improved the short film. The scenes we showed the target audience consisted of scenes 1,6 and 8 with the changes they suggested.

What they said ;

-For scene 1, a few felt that the walking at the beginning was slightly too long to counter this, we used jump cuts as they still showed the passing of time however it did so much more swiftly. 

-They also thought that it was unclear that the montage was intended to be so however, once we explained it they said it became more clear what was happening with the narrative. 

-They said it was very clear that the protagonist was happy which was intended and also saw that the friend had contrasting emotions. This was also the desired effect we wanted which had significance to the story line and made it make more sense to the audience. 

-For Scene 6 they saw that this was the protagonist trying to make new friends and seems happy when he does which is helped by a happy facial expression. 

-They also felt that the protagonist looked lonely and therefore felt sympathetic for him this is because loneliness and depression is a common thing within the target audience.

-We said we had an idea of doping this on a computer monitor but there was lines going across it when we tried to record the screen so we decided to go with a mobile device as they do not have this problem when recorded .

-We were also advised to remove text we had at the bottom of the screen as it made it seem more unprofessional and was unnecessary.

-With scene 8, we were told that the music at the end was not loud enough. To counter this, we slightly increased the volume without it becoming overpowering.

-They also said it was clear what he was going to do and was content with himself. With the use of a cliffhanger, there was a certain amount of mystery added to the narrative. 

After acting on our audience feedback, as a group we watched the newly edited footage and decided if we were happy with the changes and how the film came together.

With this new footage, we re-asked our target audience and also had a session in college to show the film to people within our target audience. From our classmates who fall into our target audience, we got the following responses. 

With this new feedback, we adjusted some more parts of our short film. We were advised to make the ending more dramatic by increasing music volume which we were previously told however were not sure how much to increase it before it became overpowering or too loud for the situation.

 We also found out that with the use of the Facebook Messenger chat, the audience could see where we renamed one of our group members to make the narrative more believable. However, due to time restraints we were unable to re-shoot this part. Later on in scene 6, we were advised to re-shoot the facial reaction of the protagonist when he find a new friend as it seems forced and over exaggerated. But, because of the time we had, we could not do so. We also had to consider that none of the people we casted were actors or drama students so it might be difficult for them to do some scenes. 

 We also changed props during recording. This may have broken continuity, however, we did not want to waste time on re-shooting the shot on the bridge. We changed the phone prop as the second one we used had a larger screen which would make it more visible when we recorded it. From this feedback multiple groups thought the ending was a little 'lack luster'. This is due to the sounds we used. We did not to make the ending too shocking as we wanted there to be an element of mystery to if the protagonist was hit or not and we felt that the sounds we used and not making them too loud enabled us to do so. Adding to this, they believed that it was a little too long. To change this we could have cut the longer scenes speeding them up however, we intended it to be long as it was meant to be a slower pace and an emotional scene which we believe would not have the same effect if it was faster paced.