Evaluation 3

What have you learned from the audience feedback?

In order to complete this evaluation, Myself and Zoe discussed a number of different questions that would make up a questionnaire for my target audeince. I then went away, put together the questions together and gave out as many of them to my target audience as possible. I did this not only to get feedback from my audience but the whole purpose of doing this short film was to please my audiences needs and wants; this will in turn allow my film to be successful. By creating a questionnaire it allows me to gain detailed information straight away from the audience, so I can find out what they liked or maybe disliked about my short film. I have purposely selected a range of opened and closed questions and used flow of emotion to gain access on how the audience felt when watching my film. This also helps me to gain quantitive and qualitative details. 
Throughout making and planning my project, I wanted to make sure I concentrated on the target audience as they would obiously be the individuals watching the short and will hopefully find it successful. I based my age range on 12-50, as there is no real explicit content that would scar or be inappropiate for a 12 year old indiviudally; this meant I would focus on this age range to complete my questionnaire. At the beginning of this project, I did primary research into SAGEL; social econoimic group, age, gender, ethnity and lifestyle. My film is aimed at middle/lower class groups, however anyone is welcome to watch it, the gender is mainly based on males, but females are known to watch this genre film so I tried to concentrate on both genders. As I have said above I have based my film on the age range of 12-50 mainly because the content can be related to a wide range of people. On top of this I aimed my ethnity on White British because it is produced in Britian and the lifestyle of my audience could be a person from a working back ground. Furthermore, I also used the Laura Mulvey male gaze theory which is based mostly on including whats known as a pretty young girl, with an old man being the victim. This is also based on including certain actions in the film to express the females body parts or beauty; this will attract the male gaze. Below are the questionnaire responses I gained from my audience, after they watched my short film.
After looking over Uses and Gratications, I can see that my audience may be able to gain certain feelings or thoughts in my film. As media consumers or readers watch texts in different ways and for different reasons, it's harder to furfil ways to achieve feelings that audience want to gain, as the artistic worth is subjective for different views; however through the genre we chose, this can be narrowed down and we can suggest what they want to gain through this idea, and purposely use different ideas or events to achieve this. Within my short film, my audience could use my text to gain the following purposes; this could be a personel relationship with Lilly, which will allow them to create a emotional or other interactions with the young girl, due to the position she is in or the events that are happening to her. The audience could feel sympathy for her or scared for her. I think this is a good way to interact with the audience, as it is so easy for the audience to gain these feelings, using conventions like abducting young children or putting someone innocent through fear through different ways and events, I particularly know this because I have gained the same reactions and feelings in films such as the Lovely Bones, Cupcake (Anotehr short film) and Along came a spider and these are the films which I have think link to my film and the events that I have chosen, so I hope my audience gains simialar feelings to what I did.

 

Questionnaire Responses

 

After looking at my questionnaire results, I have seen a pattern that mostly every one of my participant liked the film as they all said 'yes' in question 1; this shows me that altogether the short film was successful and my auduience did like it. They also rated the film '4/5' in most reponses which is very successful as it suggests that the film was liked and the feelings and actions I wanted to achieve were liked. I also think it is a personal achievement to gain a rate that high mostly because it was the first time I acted, and had to produce such a scared and terrified approach, which actually proved very hard. As a whole, I think I have learnt to plan very wisely before filming what you want to achieve; this proved time consuming but worthwile mostly because by planning ideas before like camera shots helped me to figure out what types of feelings these will gain. For example, in one of the responses from the questionnaires the person liked the 'different angles, camera shots and the graveyeard scene' and in this particular secton I planned a huge amount of camera shots before filming them, especially the low level footsteps in the leaves, which builds on the anticipation for the audience. By planning ahead, allowed a lot of time to be saved as I didn't have to think of ideas from the top of my head, I could just get on with the features I had planned.

I also worked closely with using 'Flow of emotion' within my questionnaire, as it allowed me to gain what and how my audience felt when watching my short film. This was really useful for me, as I gave my audience a list of feelings I wanted them to feel whilst watching the film. Mostly all my responses came back with achieving one of these feelings, meaning that I was successful in the way I built and created feelings through my acting, sounds, camera shots and mise en scene. I also gave my audience a chance to suggest any new feeings they may have felt and none of them felt differently. By doing this, it suggests that they understood the flow of meaning if they picked up these trending feelings and emotions from the content of my film; this meant that my audience were on the same understanding as me and how I feel about my film. To link to this idea, I asked my audience in question 5 'Dod the storyline work for you? ', which helped me to understand if they got the feelings and meaning of the film. All my responses came back answering yes, meaning that the flow of meaning was successful and they understood the storyline.

I have also learnt to keep time precious, mainly due to the fact that it goes so quickly when doing a project like this. However, after doing a similar project before doing my short film, I had the chance to practice editing and filming when doing 'the day in the life' project, although it was much shorter, including a total time of one minute. I learnt a lot in this project and it mostly allowed me to development my skills to prevent the same problems happening again. One of the biggest problems I faced was time, as I ran out of time when I was editing and ended up spending too much time on filming; this helped me schedule my time when it came to my short film, as I knew editting would be a major part to maintain a successful short film. I also think my film was successful due to the responses of my audience, as there weren't any abberrant or oppostional readings , which meant that my audience didn't like the content of my film or didn't get it and understand it. However, I think there was a lot of room for negotiated readings within my film as the ending wasn't shown or spelt out to the audience on what happen to my victim; this meant that the audience had to work out for themselves that she died in the end and how she died to them is up to their imagination.

Looking closely at question 6, I wanted to make sure that suggestions for improvements were included within my questionnaire; this is to give my audience to point out the bad features or features they may not like, which will allow me to improve my film to suit my audience more too. I picked up that some people didn't really like the ending, mostly because they wanted to know what happened to the victim and wanted to know if she died or escaped. However, as time was very precious and demanding, this was a big factor that I couldn't really change as it seemed almost impossible to reshoot as our deadline was fastly approaching and we both had over committments; this meant as a whole we couldn't succeed the audiences wishes to change the ending so they could find out if the victim lives or dies. Before shooting the film, I did believe this genre would be challenging as at sdome point in the film I would have to show how the victim dies or escapes. To twist this up slightly I thought it would be clever to not actually show how she dies and see how effective that is for the audience. Also it was extremely difficult to produce a scene on this idea as the murder was my media teacher and I think it would be very hard and uncomfortableto act and produce this. To gain information on this particular factor, I thought it would be very benefitical to center a question within the questionnaire on this topic of the film. I asked the audience in question 7 'Did you like the grim ending or would you rather a happening ending'; this would show us what type of ending as a whole they would of prefered. Mostly all my participants stated that they liked the grim ending as it supported the events and feelings express throughout the film; however some participants would have rather know what happened to the victim. Again, we did have a fast approaching deadline and if we didn't have this problem in the way I would of definitely filmed more to portray what happens to the victim.

I also picked up that some people thought the camera could of been more stable in some areas; this was very helpful for me as this camera shot was actually purposly done to suggest the effect of realism, however it is helped me to see that maybe the audience didn't like this camera shot and this could of been changed. Although, I did get a lot of comments back saying they liked the camera shots and angles, so I wont change this feature to please one person. On top of this, when participants were watching the film, occassionly I would sit with them and wait for the responses. By doing this, I actually found and picked up on a number of little errors that seemed to be ocurring. This shown me that all the small editting parts really matter, and by changing these could make the film better. I then suggested to my partner if they needed to be changed and we did so.

In conclusion, I feel I have learnt a lot from my audiences feedback. I found that showing others your work can help you to see from a different perpecive rather than your own; this then helps you to improve work to suit your audience. If I hadn't of gained audience, my project may not have been successful to my audience and they may not have liked it. However, gaining this information allows them to suggest problems or other suggestions to appeal to them.