What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In all stages of the pre production, production, and post production of our media product it was necessary we accumulated constant audience feedback. As in any field of the media world, audience is king! Therefore we could keep on improving and developing each of our ideas in order to make our product as successful as it could be. The first audience feedback we received was from our first pitch idea. In order to gain feedback we pitched our first idea for our short film to the rest of our class. From this we learned and realised many different things. We learned that it wasn't clear how our story linked to our original inspiration colour "red". However, after we explained this to audience telling them how the themes within the film, such as love, anger, passion and revenge were associated with the colour red, as well as our key plot twist of "fire", this problem was soon resolved. From this pitch, we also learned from our feedback we needed to show the development of our characters in more depth, especially Alfie's character. We also needed to show his motivation in order to seek revenge. Therefore we decided to contrast Alfie and Johnny's characters. Johnny would be a flirtatious character always showing Marie attention, which would drive Alfie's own insecurities wild and cause him to be an extremely possessive boyfriend to Marie, always being very protective over her. The attention Johnny pays to Marie, would also be the motivation for Alfie to seek his revenge. We did this so that the audience would then understand why Alfie is so jealous of Johnny’s character, and why he acts in the manner he does. Another thing we learned from the feedback of our first scene was that the content of the flashback was unclear to people. We needed to be clearer in the pitch of what the audience would see in these scenes, and whether this is when Alfie would catch Johnny and Marie together. We decided it would be best to show the majority of the flashback scenes with just Johnny and Marie acting flirtatiously towards each other, and on the final shot of the scene show Alfie finally seeing them together, and this is were the flashback would end. By doing this we felt the audience would have a clearer understanding of Johnny and Marie’s relationship and how it had developed over a period of time. Therefore it would be more understandable to the audience for Alfie to be suspicious and jealous towards Johnny’s character. A key piece of feedback we had from our pitch was that would it be possible for us, taking our casting constraints into consideration, to be able to show Johnny and Marie's physical affection between our casts. The reason why we decided to show this physical unity between Johnny and Marie, was to open the film with a strong plot point, so the audience is aware that these actions are the cause for Alfie’s revenge. Taking this into mind we decided it would be possible, we would just have to be very selective about who we decided to cast, and ensure they were mature about the situation and were comfortable with acting in this way, as without the physical affection between the two character the scene would be lacking realism. A key point brought up in our audience feedback from our first pitch was the first scene involving a blackout. The audience was curious whether or not the action still taking place was able to be seen or not. As the scene would be filmed after school there will still be some natural daylight, so the blinds can be opened. If there is not enough light to see the action then we will add to the scene that the lights only trips out for a minute or two and then comes back on. A final piece of feedback we received from our first pitch was that there wasn't enough dialogue between Johnny and Marie in the first scene to show the scene progressing. We agreed we didn’t have enough dialogue in the opening scene to show the style of Johnny and Marie’s relationship. Therefore dialogue we added in this scene could be for Marie to tell Johnny about Alfie’s psycho ways and how it affects her. This would enable the audience to sympathise with Marie’s character so she isn’t just perceived as a cheating girlfriend. However, we will not get to in depth with the dialogue as we don’t want to use too much dialogue and keep the story simple. Taking all this feedback into consideration I was able to re-write the pitch solving all the misunderstandings and developing the advice! By using this feedback we were able to make our media product more appealing to our audience. The next stage of our pre-production which required feedback was our script. This script was drafted four times before it was finalised! The first feedback we received is that there was too much dialogue and not enough visual, so we decided to cut this down and try to add more action into the story. We thought it was more necessary to use the camera to show the characters narrative development, so therefore we cut the dialogue down. We had the same problem of too much dialogue also in Scene 4. Therefore we decided we needed to research more films in order to get some inspiration of how to move the narrative along with out dialogue. It wasn't till our 3rd draft that was finally decided we had the right amount of dialogue, as we had to keep changing and re-arranging significant parts in order for the story to make sense. The next bit of crucial feedback we received from later drafts of our script was to remove the voice over. Our audience feedback showed it wasn't necessary to have this in the scene and we could do this more effectively by just showing Alfie's character holding a newspaper with a specific headline. Therefore this would also create more suspense.
Following the script, we created a "World of the film" board so we could really understand the themes of our film and the mood we wanted to be projected. Therefore we gathered different images of what we thought related to our film and presented it to the class. We didn't get very successful feedback from this task as it seemed we were projected the wrong idea for our film throughout this board. However, after listening to the feedback, I myself found I had a better understanding of what the audience wanted from this film, and the emotions the film involved. We used celebrity images, who have been through situations the same as our characters to portray this, however the audience felt this made the mood board appear like it was in a gossip magazine. We didn't need to focus on the actual story but more on the symbols, themes and emotions of the film. However, we were told some images reflected our film such as the shadowed models face which shows a fixed intense expression, which looks quite evil. We felt this would be an appropriate facial expression Alfie would pull when he see’s Marie and Johnny together. The bottle of vodka in the image is a part of Alfie’s past as his father was an alcoholic, and possibly one of the reason’s why Alfie is so possessive over Marie, and we realised we needed to focus more on these type of aspects in our world of film board. Therefore we re made the mood board and found our second attempt was much more successful as reflecting the image we wanted it to portray.
The next step of pre-production which required our feedback was storyboarding. Again we went through several drafts of storyboarding until it was finalised and the key point which was constantly repeated through our feedback was that we did not have enough cutaway shots. Our audience thought even though our story was strong we was telling it to easily with the shots we were going to use. Even though we did finalise our storyboard, we didn't always follow this in our actual production process and on location I often found an opportunity and/or had an idea for another style or type of shot. We added many cut a way shots, and also back up shots from a variety of angles. When we was shooting scene 5 I came up with the idea to shot Alfie thinking from a variety of different angles and distances. Also in the flashback scene, the shots which we filmed in the library we decided to shoot on the actual days filming, as we had some spare time and the library was free.
After our storyboard was finalised, this was our last stage of pre-production which required feedback. We moved on to organizing our photo story board, casting, rehearsals, and then our shooting schedules and call sheets. After our actual production filming took place it was straight to the editing process! Even though feedback has been crucial at all points throughout this unit of work it became especially vital in this post-production stage. It was essential that we received feedback for each scene we put together, so we could perfect each scene before moving onto the next. After digitising our rushes and putting together a rough assemble edit it was time to edit scene one. From our feedback for scene one we firstly learned that no one really liked Marie's screaming reaction to the black out. Therefore we removed this shot as it didn't seem realistic to the audience.
We also learned it was more effective to use less shots of Marie and Johnny flirting and more cut away shots so the attention is really focusing on Alfie, as the audience said they wasn't focusing of Alfie's character which was our original intentions. We also learned that if we cut the shot when Johnny leaves Marie to go and check the door, earlier the change of angle flows better, so we adapted this change. A few of our film's reviewers thought that the shot of Alfie locking the door really dragged on, so we cut this shorter. We also had some feedback on the sound of the scene and we learned the music we use at the beginning of the scene should fade out quietly when dialogue between characters starts and be audible in the background, however it should not stop completely which is what we decided.
We also needed to add in the sound effect of an explosion after the flame is sparked, to create an effect and make the action more significant. In Scene 2, our audience fairly decided we needed to re-shoot as the continuity wasn't perfect. Some people felt the scene was rather slow paced compared to the fast, despite this being what we wanted and needed to create the mood for the scene, therefore we never took this into account. One person particularly didn't like the wind effects in this scene so we blended this with another background track. More a less all of our feed backers agreed that the ambulance sirens should be longer, so we adapted this as this was something we was intending to do anyway. According to our feedback Scene 3 was our most impressive and liked by everyone. The flashback scene had cross-fade effects which added realism and the Black & White images represent the passing of time and the past well. From our feedback of Scene 4 we learned we had already displayed the same message of the scene in the flashbacks. This scene was also poorly shot, as the continuity was bad, the camera operator was visible in the windows reflection and we didn't shoot as much footage as we should have. Therefore we decided to scrap this scene and jus interpret the good shots we had into the flashback scene. The only feedback we received in scene 5 was regarding its ending as many people felt the ending wasn't strong enough. Therefore we decided to not have Alfie's character walking away towards the camera but instead use a fade to black to end the scene, ready for the titles to appear.
After the editing process was finished the next feedback we received was that of our ancillary tasks. The first task we started on was our film poster. As a class we all discussed and incorporated ideas we thought would suit each others films. From this we learned that our poster was imagined with Alfie in the foreground with an evil expression and possibly Marie and Johnny in the background. We needed our poster to have really dark, dull colours and posses an air of mystery. Using the feedback we got, we compiled our first poster. The majority of people liked the format we produced and thought the images worked strongly. However we needed to make the writing more legible and the colour of our tagline needed to be changed to be clearer!
The next task was our Magazine Review and I thought our film would best suit a magazine such as Total Film. However once I made a review with this style of magazine in mind my feedback required my to completely change the style. Even though people thought the magazine review fitted a magazine such as "Empire" our actual film wouldn't really focus on this magazine. We also needed to add the review of other films and not focus on our own film only. Therefore I changed the entire format and style of the review to suit a magazine such as Independent Critics. I first produced the magazine review on Microsoft Publisher, but this didn’t look very professional. However, on the second draft I used Adobe Photoshop to create the review and I felt it looked much more realistic. Once I received feedback the audience felt this suited our film more appropriately however, more texts needed to be added as the reviews wasn't long enough, and therefore I had to shrink the size of the images in order to make these changes.