What have you learned from your audience

feedback?

Audience Requirements

In my recent research of the BBFC I have recognized the short film should be a 15 certificate. This is due to the infrequent strong language and violence. Our audience however felt it could push the barrier for a 12a. As Battle Los Angeles was given a 12a certificate and has strong infrequent language whilst violence yet this is limited due to the lack of blood. But the narrative of our film is much more meaningful due to Battle Los Angeles being set in the future with aliens! Due strong violence and strong language the BBFC would be very likely to class it as a 15. Before filming our film, we decided to do some research on what our audience required. One question we asked to our audience was “Is violence essential for a war film?” This is an important question for a social realism/war film due to violence being the driving force of the film. We felt by using the genre war/ social realism that we could create a great impact on the audience due 50% knowing someone in the armed forces, making it more personal for those. 80% of the audience felt violence was essential, this will not disrupt the narrative but make the film more realistic, this is essential due to it being a social realism film. It is essential to meet some expectations the audience have, we have therefore done this through slight use of blood and violence. We have let the narrative overtake the gore and blood, without the true violence and gore of blood. This makes the footage itself less shocking but the story line more effective. Another question asked was “do you think the war/social realism film will be most effective set in the past, present, future?” Here the audience liked the idea of a futurist war film as 60% felt this would be most effective. Yet we felt this would be a good time to subvert the audiences expectations, this also meant the making of the film would be easy due to it being low budget. We used past and present as the soldiers are in the present, whilst the children are the soldiers when they were children. We have incorporated the idea of future by showing peoples future careers e.g. fighting for their country.

Audience feedback on 1st draft film edit

Our first draft was interpreted well, although with much work to do we were impressed with how much the audience liked it. “i love the part with the high pitched music! Its so effective (and a little deafening) but it works and has been edited really well.” We felt the foundations of editing was done well and just needed tweaks, whilst we needed more footage due to not having enough close ups. The general trend for criticism was “I think the opening sequence goes on abit too long” we therefore made sure in the next edit to cut out much of the start scene with the boy working. Whilst we made sure not to cut out anything that would upset the narrative, this gave it much more pace. This is where we moved on from our AS short film, due to long shots being used which lasted a long time, now due to the comments we have edited out the boring long shots and made the film faster paced, making it interesting/exciting. This lead to nearly 30 seconds being taken away from the first scene. This shows we took the audiences feedback in and edited the film to meet the requirements of the audience.

Audience feedback on 3rd draft film edit

With much improvement to our film we noticed how the comments were happy to see their previous comments had an impact on the 3rd draft. The constructive comments now were more just tweaks, for example “I’d say the sound of the birds is a bit to loud, it therefore seems a bit fake.”This sound effect was turned down significantly, we felt due to the lack of music it would be necessary to have this sound noticeable, yet in our final drat we added music over the top of the bird sound effect so it seems like a diagetic sound. “I like the grenade scene which is pretty authentic and your choice of black and white for the boys scenes, this makes the change of time much clearer!” Here it shows most of the sound effects have been made perfectly synced with the film, whilst they suit well. We have also played around with the filters and followed the conventions of a film using the classic black and white filter to suggest the past. But we did not just use the original filter of this but made the brightness higher and contrast slightly higher. This made the filter unique, whilst showing the goodness in the children as they are a warm light color. With the soldiers to filter used makes the scene much more grittier to show the emotion of the soldiers, in this filter we lightened the brightness with low contrast, meaning color was weakened in the scene.

Audience feedback on final draft film edit

There many comments on the final edit which were mainly positive, one was “I love the high pitched sound!! Along with the fast paced editing it works so effectively and looks like a realistic war film. The emotional music works so well and reminds me very much of Saving Private Ryan.” As shown in the edits the pace has been sped up rapidly mainly due to the short duration of shots and many shots used for one scene, these shots mainly consisted of motivated transitions. This is very similar to other war films as the rush creates a sense of danger, this was then similarly compared to Saving Private Ryan a multi award winning film. We did do some research on this film to inspire us to make a film similar to it. We did this by looking at the shots chosen and the music. In one scene the grenade blows up stunning the hearing of a solider this is shown in our film. Yet we did not just simply copy it but changed the reaction of the protagonist. It actually meant the soldiers could advance due to the antagonists being stunned, this suggests the antagonists are not as powerful as the protagonists, yet this is subverted at the last scene.Another comment such as “The shot that tilts up to the sky is great, I also like your Film title”. This shows that the camera work in our film was well planned, whilst we made sure to keep it as professional as possible by taking numerous shots to prevent unnecessary shaking and other mistakes. We also had to change the title of the film due to another film being called “Childs Play” this was a shame but our new Latin title has more meaning to it. This is due to it meaning “to die for your country”. This suited the film perfectly due to the soldiers doing exactly that.

Audience requirements for poster

In our poster we wanted to meet the conventions of a war film, we did this through researching other film posters such as Hurtlocker. The defusing of several bomb picture was very influential due to showing fast paced action through special effects designed specifically for the film, we could not meet these requirements so decided to show the second scene of the three soldiers in the background. The effect this gave was cooperation and bravery in a war.Our audience response to the poster was “think there should be more writing, and credits need to be added, like the names of co-producers, editors, music supervisors etc…” I agree with this comment due to the first poster looking fairly plain compared to conventional film posters. The reason why we had it plain to begin with is to create focus on the fight scene. This was then improved on in the final product by adding credits and the production company. These improvements made the poster look conventional in the lower third text , whilst the rest went against normal conventions, e.g. the rule of thirds was ignored due to not having one main focus there were two, so we had the centre empty with the solider and kid looking into the centre third. Yet there were also positives such as “I like the contrast of the colours, with the white writing really standing out against the black/grey background”. This was exactly why we used the colour due to it contrasting but also showing a slight rugged side due to the colour being off white. The font was very military like, we accessed this unique font from dafont.com. This font suited the scene due to following the conventions of a war film.

Final poster edit

The original edit was the foundations of our final edit, due to the whole background image being kept and not edited much, due to the response being very positive on the background. Whilst the main trend in comments was it was lacking writing at the bottom of the poster e.g. credits. We did not include this due to creating focus on the picture yet the audience felt over wise. We felt it was very important to do so and did some research in what font is used by the film industry. When we found this font we downloaded it off the internet and added many credits, therefore meeting the audiences expectations. One comment we did receive was “I don't know what ‘mori pro patria’ actually means, so an indication of this could be added? Such as including a tag line underneath the title perhaps as this would relate it more to the war theme.” This was one of the reasons we used this title due to the enigma of the title, we felt the mystery would create interest in what the film title really meant. We feel it would create interest in the film meaning more views on sites such as Youtube. The indication of the title is shown in the posters background image, showing the soldiers are at war, showing they are willing to die for their country.

Audience requirements for Magazine

In our magazine double page spread we wanted to make it as professional as possible, therefore we decided to structure it similarly to film magazine “Empire”. I feel that Empire is one of the most respected film magazines due to its higher price tags compared to other magazines whilst the content inside is visually structured very well. Our film suited Empire due to the magazine including short film reviews. Some points we took from it were its starring system and use of subtitles. The reason for this was the star system would attract reader very easily due to a high star rating making the reader want to know what so good about the film. The use of subtitles seemed very appropriate to use a we could add our own comments under headings. Some requirements the audience had were “the text needs to flow well” this lead to numerous read throughs to make sure all the text made sense, whilst the actual content had to be interesting whilst using emotive language.“I’m not too sure however about the red framings, looks a bit amateur”. We did this to make the pictures more attractive yet due to the audience not agreeing with the colour we changed the colour to suit the audiences requirements.

Audience feedback on final draft of magazine

We improved the magazine much taking into account many of the comments this lead to many positive comments such as “I really like the final edit, it looks professional and like it could fit well into any film magazine.” and “The images you have used are perfect and portray your film well, particularly like the photo of the two directors and the comments you have used, making it more personal to the reader and more relatable.” We made this decision to add a picture of the editors to make the second page more attractive, it gave the magazine a contrast of pictures due to pictures being taken from scenes within the film, whilst the photo of the directors makes it more personal. The picture of the directors suited the editors comments box very well due to using quotes of the directors. We applied a shadow and a 10 degree angle to this picture to make it less formal showing our youth, this suggests have a low budget showing how well we did to produce with a very low budget. This decision was influenced by Jason due to him commenting “adding the directors comment and photo makes it slightly more light hearted and a film magazine isn’t meant to be a serious, academic read so this fits in well”. We made the text slightly informal to reflect the directors youth once again, making the magazine a nice read, especially for our generation due to the majority being our age who watch the film due to it being on youtube.Whilst Miles another media student felt the colour red was a bit “amateur” therefore we changed it to a light blue, we got this idea through the film magazine Total Film. This gave the magazine more variation with not only the colour red but blue as well now. The colour blue contrasted nicely with red, the reason why we wanted contrast was to portray the change in person from child to solider. These three products created a brand image through the similarity they had, this means the viewer would recognise they were from the same media product. Overall we are very happy with our final edits of all media texts, this was backed up by the positive comments left by our fellow media students.