Critical Evaluation Question 3- Matthew Gollick

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Ultimately, the audience are crucial to every media production. Without the audience to feedback it is almost impossible to know what the potential audience are expecting form you as a producer. The audiences “hype”, ratings or general feedback will help the film reach its best potential and to become successful. The audience is a really important aspect to making a film successful and we started to find our audience from the use of questionnaires where random members of the public gave us useful feedback up on our ideas, for a film story line and for other materials such as title sequences we thought the entire pre-production stages engaged with our audience as much as possible they through our researching stages they gave use some constructive feedback which made us tweak, remove and re gig our ideas to make them fit the audience’s needs.  So that is what we did after gathering the initial ideas.

The feedback below helped us find out what our audience age range was. 

From this questionnaire we found a female and male audience however mainly male audience where draw in by our ideas. We also found that the age of people that looked into our film was between 12-20. However from our audience feedback we did find that our ideas were maybe not as good as they possibly could be, so we decided to go back into our ideas here and re think them. We decided to come up with more ideas around our audience’s response including aspects like a twist. Then we created another set of ideas which we posted to our blog. 

We then put these ideas out to the same audience. The feedback was heavily one sided to using idea 3 which help us make a decision for what idea we was going to produce for our final outcome. 

We then went out and video recorded some of the public in our local environment of the college. However this wasn't as successful for us so we decided to put out a paper questionnaire which we sent out to the public via social networking sites.

We used all of the findings of both video and paper questionnaire to finalise a film idea. We did find that the feedback was helpful and the sound of idea 3 was really dominant when we looked back at our feedback. 

The next stage was to produce our film treatment which the group member Tom made for the film title “The unpredictable” this is where we began to try and sell our film to the audience the feedback was really positive and this motivated us to produce the final film idea. 

We used this treatment to go and produce our film.  This treatment highlighted the key aspects of effects which we planned to use in our film. Also gave a through detail description of the films storyline. I then came up with some ideas for a title sequence these ideas were placed on a questionnaire which I aimed at the same audience as before via social media Facebook.

From this audience feedback I found out that the first idea 1 was more liked by our audience so we decided to go ahead with this idea and continued with it from our research during pre-production and made it in the production stage.

Rough cut of film "The Unpredictable"

            Once we had produced the rough cut version of our film which we took into consideration the audience via their feedback and inputs to what they think we should add to our film and title sequence as a group we highlighted the feedback from the title sequence idea questionnaire and we found that the overall idea worked well in the eye of the audience they really like the idea of using close ups of Brain’s face as it gives the impression of abnormal and paranormal activity which helps sets the mood for the film, the audience will like the cross zoom editing effects which the idea I gathered from my research into real media texts as it is often used in supernatural thrillers, this was something which the audience really liked. However we also found that the audience wanted to see more symbols being brought into the title sequence so I added other symbols such as chess board game this feedback helped me meet the needs of the audience and I feel it improved the title sequences for the better. The main film also included some great aspects which I found from my revised idea questionnaire, the positive feedback around the use of a dramatic twist at the end proved to be a great idea as the audience began to get really engaged with the film through the positive feedback which we received. One other satisfying aspect of the final film was the uses of a wide range of shots we used to keep the audience interested with the twisty storyline which we used for the final film. In terms of editing that we used knowing that our audience would like it was the use of rhythmic edits and sound effects. Rhythmic edits will help the audience to be drawn into the most tension build up parts of the film, our film starts off with high tension and slows down with longer shots and then becomes much faster in cuts towards the end when the tension rises once again. The locations which we used will also satisfy the audience as they often watch films in the supernatural genre and we have used the day to day locations of which Brian and his friends come into contact with this works well bearing in mind that a thriller is often based on characters and it follows them closely to see the insight of what they feel and see.

Final cut of film "The Unpredictable" 

            We had way too much footage for the 5 minute requirement. So this has expressed my editing skills to reduce the time from a 9 minute film down to just over 5 minutes. We produced a rough cut of our film to show this. We also felt that from the rough cut of our film we needed to put music over the none dialogue parts of the film to make it run a lot smoother in terms of sound. also once we had made the sufficient cuts to the film we made a feedback questionnaire for the audience to tell us what they thought of the final film.  We sent this out via social networking sites. The feedback was positive and we were pleased that we produced a film which is what most of the audience expected. As I was involved throughout the entirety of the pre-production till the very end of post-production it was exciting for me to see what people thought of our final film. I also wanted to find out what people would want us to change for next time.  I am pleased to see from the responses which we got highlighted that the audience really liked how I edited the film and title sequence. The majority of people have stated that they like how the film was shot. Also they feel that the film fits the intended film genre of the supernatural thriller as we intended to achieve this from the get goes. We as a group are really happy with the positive feedback. 

The questionnaires were sent out via our social media accounts to gain a much wider response from our audience.