Lewis Brookes: Evaluation Question Three

Voice-Over

3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The main principle of a films success is based on the audiences feedback. When we were creating our film we had a good idea on how we wanted our audience to feel such as suspense and emotions we wanted to betray. We knew that for our target audience to tell others about a film they had to enjoy it therefore we were providing tense music and intense sound effects like the gunshot, when hoping for good audience feedback. 

Once we finished the final draft of our treatment, we felt it was necessary to get feedback on our film, the initial point of this was if our audience didn’t like the idea we would think of something else. 

I produced a questionnaire, which I asked various people to complete.  This allowed both of us to gain feedback on whether our film would be interesting enough, for many people to see it. We were then able to customise our film around this feedback such as the different genres of film they were interested in and there opinion on the certificate they thought the film would be.

http://www.blogger.com/blogger.gblogID=8751492390644401569#editor/target=post;postID=1356088383301738487


We also undertook research by filming other people, by asking further and detailed questions therefore giving more detailed feedback. Such as what they thought of our idea and what films are if any, similar to our own.  People compared our film to saw as this has really tense music and keeps you in suspense. We wanted to create this in our own.

By using all of this gathered information we used it to make our film. Because our footage was under the limit of five minutes we asked people how they thought we could make it longer and interesting. They said they would like to see Andrew Francis at work to see how he would act in a different environment. After the first post-production of our film we thought we needed to ask people in our class, friends and family about the first draft. People fairly gave us critical feedback on parts they thought we could improve such as clearer titles, a voice-over to allow the audience to interact more with Andrew and more tense and powerful sound-effects.

These changes were urgently made afterwards. We then posted this to different medias like FaceBook 


(www.facebook.com) and YouTube (www.youtube.com) and gained much feedback from various people including our target audience. There were parts in our film which did confuse our audience such as cutting from the killing to Andrew’s house but this was intended as flash forwards for the audience to interpret what was happening, to fit the pieces together. They also said that the second killing was perhaps too dark but we wanted this mise-en-scene as it’s a critical part in the film.

By getting further feedback from others amongst audiences including family and friends, classmates and our teacher, this received much praise for our efforts believing it would be a success and we had no negative feedback on further changes.
The point of asking for feedback is to improve the film and it can be easy to ignore.  We could have been ignorant and not listened to the comments from our audience believing it would succeed. Because I have been involved with everything in the film (editing, planning and filming I had to take into account things woudn’t always go smoothly. Therefore you must be self critical and say ‘we need to change that!’ as the audience knows what they want.

So the feedback we have gained from our audience has been extremely important. Without this feedback the film would not have succeeded with little continuity making a confusing storyline and little connection to the characters personalities.