Tom Morris Evaluation question 3

3 – What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Having looked initially at the brief, we looked into various genres and ideas. As you can see on the blog, we played around with other storylines and possible outcomes, until we finally decided to go down the route of a psychological thriller. This we thought would be effective as we had done something of similar style the previous year. That wasn’t on the same lines of course, but the story, in a sense, is similar in terms of the severity and darkness to the story, even if it isn’t until the end.

Once we had decided on this idea however, it was fairly clear on where we were to take it. The criteria stated that the film must be five minutes, the end product being a few seconds over I believe, but we wanted to get every aspect in, cutting it down to an extent at which it still made sense to the viewer.

In order to understand what our audience thought of our idea, we produced an electronic questionnaire in which we distributed on the internet. Also, we made a video where we attempted to film various people answering our questionnaire in person. This however, didn’t go exactly to plan, but we had the answers from at least one person in the end.

In terms of meaning, we didn’t as such struggle, but in editing we did have to make considerable cuts in order to get it near the five minute mark. We initially felt this would take key parts away from the film, taking away meaning and would confuse the reader. However, we found that we could cut it down and still make sure it made sense and followed our story rather well, if not better. Some parts I saw as excessive, anyway. We filmed in parts, which helped with continuity so we didn’t get lost, as such.

Effects such as black and white and the repetition of these shots help the viewer understand the film better. Also, sound effects over these shots give them a better understanding of what’s happening and why.

We distributed a rough cut of our film and found that viewers liked the idea of the storyline and the effects in which we used. We shortened the film after due to the length. We needed to get as close to five minutes as we could.