What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Receiving audience feedbackThis year we had a variety of ways to receive audience feedback for our work.

Pitching to our class – One way was to pitch the ideas of a project to our class before we went ahead with designs and then creating the project overall, for my case it was the short film idea, then editing and then the final print product and any last minute editing changes. The class would give feedback on what them as the target audience would like to see out of their best interests, by doing this we were able to see what they liked and disliked and adjusted towards the feedback received.

BTEC group – Another way that we could receive feedback was from people in the college who are studying a similar course, BTEC Media, similarly they gave us suggestions on changes that would improve our work, they were less familiar with our ideas so they mainly focused on constructive criticism which helped more often than not.

Social Media – Lastly we were able to gain audience feedback from sharing our work on social media websites such as twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. They could leave feedback underneath of message us personally about improvements, this was a different way to receive feedback in comparison to the first two as this was on a larger scale as it could have been sent to family and friends from across the world.

Pitching initial ideas to the classWhen it first came to pitching our ideas to the class we were able to be fully creative, we could come up with multiple completely distinctive ideas, we would gather feedback based on feasibility, if they audience would be interested or not, the themes which the film would be based on, we took all the feedback into account and then structured one idea that would like to produce in the following year.

Eventually we came across videos on YouTube called “Songs in real life” by Steven Kardynal, a popular YouTube film maker, this instantly inspired us to create a film following a similar theme but using conflicts created by society in the UK such as drinking and young adults. Here I presented our idea to my classmates, I would create a film revolving around 3 ‘geeks’ who plan to throw a huge party through Facebook, in a bid to become ‘Facebook Famous’.

As they audience understood that we would using song lyrics over speech throughout the film they advised that we should use a mixture of the two otherwise it wouldn't work if we just used songs only. People felt that the concept would be unique but we had to make sure that acting was shown differently from our inspiration videos. As the target audience they felt that it could be something that they would be able to relate to or other people could understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOsyL21QRUA

Feedback on treatment and idea Today we got handed back our pre-production work, we were given feedback based on what we handed

in. Overall the work was graded a solid B, with that said beforehand we knew we had work still missing and things we could vastly improve on such as the script and making the storyboard clearer.

Here are the comments on what was good and bad and what to improve:

- Ensure you have completed call sheets each day of shooting.

- A very detailed storyboard and fairly useful script

- Do you need to think about lip sync elements on the storyboard?

A fairly strong pre-production folder.

These positive comments ensured us that we are on the right track and we ourselves know that we can improve on this, we are aiming to turn this pre-production work into solid A grade work.

Filming & BTEC feedbackPartway through filming and editing we were given the option to receive feedback from BTEC students, we though the more feedback the better as we would be showing our film to a wider audience which will only have a positive impact on our final product. They understood that the film wasn’t any where near finished before they were shown so they would only judge what has been done so far and what needs to be done.

As we were missing a lot of our film because of needing to reshoot scenes we weren't able to receive a lot of constructive criticism that was helpful.

We received feedback such as:

“You need to lip sync the songs better”“The actors need to stay in character when filming”“Make sure you film and the lighting is the same”

Pitch feedbackYesterday we presented our pitch to our peers, here is a video footage of us presenting it. We received positive feedback regarding to our poster layout, they felt that the way we positioned the photo and header will provide a good balance between the focus of the poster. We proposed two layouts which had differences between the headers, actor information and photo positioning, we asked which one would be more suitable for the genre of our short film, and which one would bring more interest to the film.

People recommended that we presented the main three characters on the front of the poster with a catchy punch line above the title to intrigue the audience, this is something we implemented. When we presented the idea of editing the photo to fit the house style of Facebook people were a bit apprehensive until they were shown a test version, afterwards we got strong support and carried on to use it for our film poster, overall it came out better than we expected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF-60x8PVeE

Focus groupsWe made a list of three focus groups for the film Students Young adults Comedy advocates

In our second focus group we presented the audience the rough-cut version of our film. When we presented the film it was still not finished so we also explained at the end what we are going to add. After we presented our video to the audience we asked for their feedbacks. The feedbacks were mainly positive which shows that we are heading on the right track.

Screening of short filmAfter the screening of the short film, we received a variety of feedback for things like camera shots, editing techniques and so on. People listed the strong points of the film and things we should consider changing, they were the target audience so they were the people we wanted to impress and aim the film towards.

We decided to make minor changes like colour correction to certain scenes and fix up small lip sync scenes which were a bit off but other than that we are happy with out film.

People also listed the strengths of the film such as the intro, they felt that the music and editing went well together, some of the party scenes they were able to relate to, our primary aim was to make sure someone could link themselves or someone they know to this so that’s a success somewhat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOw_3WJ4Lhg