Evaluation Question 3

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The target audience for our short film is people aged 16-25. Our group fall into this age range, so we have created our film in a way so that it would be appealing to us, and people close to our age. This was effective because we knew what conventions and styles we could apply to be able to reach out to this audience, and gather interest and investment. We also knew from our research what types of narrative and genre both interest and apply to us. We chose the genre of social realism, as this genre was the most interesting to us, and the one which applied to us the most. We saw social realism as a genre that could apply to us, as being 16-25 we have very social lives, and a narrative that  ties in social problems or elements would be relevant to us being that we are currently in a very social stage of our lives.

Audience feedback has been essential in trying to achieve the best film possible for our target audience. We reached out to and received feedback from people within our target age, and we have used this feedback to improve on our products throughout the time we spent creating our short film and ancillary tasks. Feedback is one of the best ways we used to improve our work, as it gave the most realistic evaluation of our work at that stage because all the improvements suggested and comments made were created by our target audience.

For audience feedback, we used various method of getting responses from our target audience. 16-25 years old is one of the age ranges with the highest amount of internet use. In a 2015 survey, it was found that 96 percent of 18 to 29-year olds asked were internet users. We used this to our advantage, and used several methods of gathering feedback online, including online surveys and social media.

Short Film

We used audience feedback at various stages throughout the planning and production of our short film. During our planning stage we used an online survey to record audience’s opinions on our plans for the short film. This was advantageous, as our target audience is very present online, and this was a way of using technology to our advantage.

This survey shows the audience interest given based on the title alone. While there were more people interested than not, the majority of the audience said that they might be. This showed us that the name for our short film was likely to gain some attention, however, we needed an equally good marketing campaign. We did consider other names, however, we thought that this was the only one that didn't give too information much away.




Again, this survey showed similar results for our choice of genre. While more said yes than no, there was still a large proportion of people that they wanted to know more before they agree. We stuck with this genre, as the numbers were tied between yes and maybe, which is mostly a positive review

This question applied to our genre and theme. As it turns out, most people agreed or agreed to an extent that it was a relevant problem, and on that we should tackle with our short film.

This survey showed very good feedback on our idea of doing a time lapse. it was obvious to us here that we should go ahead with our plans, as the vast majority of responses did indeed support our choice for a time lapse

I asked some people what they thought of our film after we had finished the rough cut version, before we went back to refine and better our work. We did this so that we could get a feel for what people liked and disliked about our film. We did this sooner rather than later so that we had ample time to go back and make improvements.

Based on the feedback I received, and that our group received collectively, we decided that the main areas for improvement would be the quality of the shots, and the shakiness of the camera. We reviewed our film and found the parts with the worst quality. These were the scenes that we had shot with the IPhone, as when we transferred them from the phone to Final Cut Pro we had lost a great amount of quality. This left our footage looking blurred and difficult to make out details. We decided to reshoot these scenes, and this time we used a Sony camera. The footage we captured after was much better quality, and made the whole film flow better due to there being a consistent quality throughout. 

We also fixed the problem of the shakiness. The shaky scene in particular was the time lapse. Again, this had been shot with an IPhone using a time lapse feature. This, however, sped up the footage too much, meaning that simply walking and recording now looked very shaky and bumpy. We again decided to reshoot this scene, and we shot it with a shorter distance and running time, so that we could speed it up, but not to the point where it was noticeably shaky. There was still some movement from the camera, but it was not nearly as bad as it was before we reshot that scene.

Poster

For my second draft poster, which with improvements was the one we decided to use as a group, I got some feedback at the stage where it was mostly completed. i did this so that based on the feedback I could alter the poster accordingly and make it better overall.

The overall response was that it looked like a poster for a short film, but I needed to better my use of space and layout. We decided as a group that this was the poster that we should use, and therefore reviewed comments made on the first version.

Based on the comments I decided that it would be appropriate to crop the image down a bit, and resize a couple of things to better use the space available. I made the title bigger and more perspective based. We decided that it lacked many of the conventions needed initially, so we filled up the corners with the billing block, social media links, and film awards, making sure to add shadow to the areas being covered to make these conventions stand out just a little bit more. This made it look more complex than it did before, and everything was laid out very formally and there were no unprofessional looking elements on the poster.

Below is a before and after image of the final poster, that we decided on based on group decisions and audience feedback. The image on top if the first version, and the below image is the improved and final copy.