Advanced Portfolio Evaluation - Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Advanced Portfolio Evaluation - Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is a very useful tool that film makers can use during the production stage of creating a film. This allows you to ask questions to members of the target audience about certain parts of the short film and from the feedback they give you can make adjustments to the short film to make it better and make it more appealing to the target audience. As a group we were able to get lots of useful audience feedback from some members from our target audience which helped us adjust our short film to make a higher quality final product. The target audience for our short film is young adults from the age of 17 to 25 both male and female.

There are various ways that you can get audience feedback, for example you could:

• Record a video of the target audience as they watch the short film.
• Just record the voice's of the target audience.
• Set up an online survey with questions and ask the audience to fill it out once they have watched the short film.
• Ask members of the audience the questions in person and write down their responses.

What we did to get our audience feedback was set up a Facebook group chat with 10 members of the target audience and then we asked them to watch our short film and then we asked them a series of questions. With there answers to the questions we worked out what the target audience liked about our short film and what they didn't like and we changed what they didn't like accordingly.

Before we started editing our short film we rendered out the rushes of some of the key scene of our short films. This means that we could get a rough look at how some of the key scene would look without any editing and we could see what the target audience thought about it. We showed the audience the rushes for scenes 1, 6 and 8 and then asked them what they though about each of the scenes.

Here is what they said:

Scene 1:

• They felt that the character in the blue trousers (the protagonist) was very happy. This is how we wanted the character to come across in this scene.
• We had to explain to the sample audience that this scene was supposed to be a montage and once we told them that then they all understood that it was supposed to show the protagonist being happy with his friend.
• Also, they said that the friend appears to be sad which is made more apparent by the happiness of the protagonist. This is good because the audience will be shocked by what happens in the next scene, however, they will then be able to understand why the friend looked so and maybe they will be able to connect the dots to realise that the friend killed himself.

Scene 6:

• They understood that this was the part of the story where the protagonist is trying to fix his loneliness by connecting with other people and trying to make new friends.
• They felt sympathy with the character as he is trying to fix the problem he is having. This is good because it helps the audience connect with the character on an emotional level because loneliness and depression is something that can affect people within the target audience of the short film.
• On top of this, we explained to them that this scene was originally planned to happen on a computer, however, we changed it to a phone because we thought is would be more relate able. They agreed with us because they said most of the time people use Facebook on their phones to talk to other people which meant the target audience could relate to it more than if we had used a computer.
• They did have one negative about this scene which was because the atmosphere of the scene is happy they felt that the costume of the character was very dark and sad. They said that the costume should have been lighter to match the happy atmosphere. We do agree with this, however, at the start of the scene even though the character is determined to find a new friend he is still grieving over his dead friend.
• Finally, they said that the characters facial expression showed that he is determined which is good because we want the audience to know that the protagonist is determined to overcome his problem.

Scene 8:

• When we showed this scene to the sample they said that the character appears to be happy with what he is doing.
• Also, they said that it is very clear what he is going to try and do, additionally, they said that they really like the cliff hanger ending because to makes them question whether he will actually kill himself. They said that is is effective because it makes them think back to the other parts of the short film and think whether he would go through with the act of killing himself.
• They did say that it looked good with the fog in the background of the shots which helped the scene seem more mysterious, however, they said it was very light out which gave the scene a happier feel than we wanted it to.

Then once we had this feedback we made sure to change any part of the short film during the editing process that the target audience didn't like.

After we had edited all of the moving image and all of the sound together we render the short film. This was an initial render or a first render so we knew that this would not be the final product that we would be submitting. We took the first render and we showed it to the same people that we used for the initial audience feedback. Then once they had viewed it we asked them a series of questions.

Before we showed the short film to the group of the target audience we had a group screening with all the group members. During this, we had a look at some aspects of the short film and made sure that we were happy with the final product that we had created. The main thing that we changed is we got rid of the text that said "The next day". This is because we felt that it made the short film look less professional and it is not normally seen in real short films. This meant that we had to create a black screen between scene 1 and scene 2 to make it clear that it was a different day between the two scenes.

Here is the video we showed them:

Here are the questions we asked them:

• What did you think of the short film?
• Could you clearly understand why the protagonist wanted to kill himself?
• Do you think the protagonist ended his life?
• Was it clear the protagonist was lonely?
• Was it clear that the protagonist was content with killing himself?
• Are there any issues in the image editing that stood out to you as you watched the short film?
• Are there any issues with the sound editing that you noticed when you watched the short film?
• Were there any parts of the short film that didn't make sense or made the short film boring?

Here is the feedback that the target audience gave us:

• What did you think of the short film?

All the people that viewed the film said that they enjoyed watching it. They said that it wasn't too long which could have made it boring, however, it was not too short so that information could have been missed. Also, lots of the viewers noticed the subtle repetition within the short film which was used to emphasise certain parts of the film, for example, in the scene where the protagonist sees his friend again and then the friend disappears. 

• Could you clearly understand why the protagonist wanted to kill himself?

All of the members of the audience understood why the protagonist wanted to kill himself. However, some of the members of the audience thought that the protagonist killing himself  was very extreme. They felt that if the story was more explanatory showing that he has been lonely for a very long time then it would have made more sense for the protagonist to think about suicide. 

• Do you think the protagonist ended his life?

The short film left a cliff hanger which all of the members of the audience really liked about the short film. They liked it because it left them some uncertainty about whether he would have actually tried to commit suicide or not. This is what we wanted the audience to think. Also, we asked whether they think that he went through with the suicide or not. Some of the people said yes because they assumed that this person didn't have any friends for a long time. On the other hand, most of the people though that he didn't kill himself they just thought that he was thinking about it. As a group, we felt that the protagonist wouldn't have killed himself because it would have been a very drastic thing to do.

• Was it clear the protagonist was lonely?

All of the members of the target audience said that they could clearly see that the protagonist was lonely. Also, they said that they liked how the protagonist was doing things on his own that he used to do with his friend, however, he is doing them on his own. This adds a good element of repetition to the short film.

• Was it clear that the protagonist was content with killing himself?

Most of the audience could tell the protagonist was content with killing himself. They said that the final shot in the short film showed that he was content with killing himself. We were worried about this shot because it was very hard to convey to the audience that the protagonist was content because the protagonist was not played by an actor. However, some of the audience were a bit confused with the last shot and they said it would have been better to show that he was content in a better way. Also, they said that once we told them that the protagonist was meant to be content with killing himself then they could see it more clearly from the final shot.

• Are there any issues in the image editing that stood out to you as you watched the short film?

They said that they couldn't see any major issue with the image editing in the short film. However, one thing they did say was the during shots where there is a lot of movement the was a slight blur or ghosting around the movement. This was an issue with the camera and the export that we did notice, however, there were a lot of still shots in the short film that were in focus and not blurry so we decided to leave this issue. Also, it would be very hard to get rid of all of the blurriness that appeared in the short film.

• Are there any issues with the sound editing that you noticed when you watched the short film?

They said that there was only one noticeable issue with the audio of the short film. This was that at the end of the short film the car screeching sound only played through the left speaker of their computer. This is not a huge issue because the sound is still clear, however, this is a small detail that makes the short film seem less professional.

• Were there any parts of the short film that didn't make sense or made the short film boring?

The final question that we asked the group were any parts of the short film boring. All the people that view our short film said that none of the parts of the short film were boring. This is good because during the editing process we made sure to be thorough when choosing what should be in the short film to make sure that anything that was in the short film was relevant to developing the story or intriguing the audience.

We didn't have to make many adjustments to our short film because we make sure to carry out audience research through the whole production process which meant we were constantly changing small things before we did the first render. This is why it was so useful to do the initial audience feedback on the rushes of the key scenes.

Extra Audience Feedback:

As well as all of the other audience feedback that we have obtained for our media product we have, also, got some audience feedback of the final product. We had a screening of our fully completed short film and then the audience that watched our short film they gave us some feedback on what they liked and what they didn't like about our final short film.

Here is the feedback:

Overall, the feedback that we revived for the final product of our short film was very positive which is good. Some of the negative points that members of the audience raised included certain parts of the ending being too long and that the ending could have been better if there were extra foley sounds. Also, there were some negative points about the acting of the protagonist because some of the facial expressions seemed very forced, this is due to the person playing the protagonist not being a professional actor which limited the ability of the actor.