Audience Feedback evaluation question - Erol

3.) What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

Audience feedback is essential when creating professional quality products. Audience feedback has helped us to make decisions about our film which would benefit us in a number of different ways. Although we lacked a certain amount of audience feedback there is a certain amount which were useful. We decided that our audience would be between the ages of 18-35, which I believe is a good age range with plenty of variety. Thriller films and psychological thriller films are the most popular with this age range and this is why we decided to aim our shortfilm at this demographic.

As a group we carried out a number of questions in order to gain some valuable feedback on our film, research and planning ideas. As a result we only managed to get feedback on a small number of people however it was enough to give us an idea about what we would have to make adjustments to in general. This feedback was enough to give us something to work from and improve our product so that it would be even more appropriate for our target audience. Jacob cleverly put these results into a series of pie chart (shown below). These help to explain our findings although they are not particularly specific it helped us to gain a good idea about what people thought in general about our film. The pie chart below directly shows how over 87% of people agreed that our story worked well and fitted with our theme of psychological thriller (which was very important to us). Whereas only 12% of people had certain issues with the narrative especially at the end as it was perhaps confusing at times for the audience.

With only 12% of people saying that our story 'maybe' works shows that overall it was clear about what was happening during the shortfilm and what relevance each character had to the plot. We established together as a group that the plot itself was a good idea but our overall execution lacked in certain areas, for example the narrative may not be clear in certain places causing 'confusion' which is what some of the people surveyed had used to describe our narrative at times. This was the only reason for them choosing 'maybe' instead of 'yes'. However we did not expect everyone to agree that our film worked well as there is always room for improvement although we were pleased to see that no one voted 'no' towards the answer.

The pie chart below was using the same group of people but this time the question asked whether or not someone would go to see this film in a cinema. We were slightly surprised to see that only just over 60% of our audience would go to see this film in cinema as this is only just over half. However these people stated that they did not like category of film anyway which we were not too bothered about as this was something which was out of our control. However we still had a large number of people who voted maybe instead of directly 'yes'. We were disappointed to see so many people would were sceptical about whether they would go to see it in cinema or not, but afterwards we remembered that it was only a short film and not a normal film so we thought perhaps people might have thought that it might not have been worth going to see a shortfilm. 

However although we received slightly negative feedback about whether someone would go to see it in a cinema we found out that people found the screaming and some of the backing track in the short film more comical than funny. We understand from their point a view how this may have seemed but we decided to include this in as it helped us to suggest genre and keep within our psychological thriller theme.

Another pie chart below shows how many people agreed that our film was a psychological thriller or if they did not, what genre they thought it might come under. For example number of people said that our film was more horror based. I personally disagree with this as there are no iconic horror conventions used in our sequence. We attempted to carefully select conventions of a typical thriller / psychological thriller which would help to establish our theme. No one thought our film was anything other than a psychological thriller or a horror which was good to hear, even the people who said our screaming sound was comical said that our film was within these sub genres. We could understand why people thought it may just be a typical thriller film as we aimed to create out film so that it would be open to interpretation, for example whether or not The Faceless Man is supernatural is completely down to the audience. This is something which would make a typical thriller film into a psychological thriller.

Unfortunately even we knew that this would not be true to the storyboard as we had a lot of last minute planning and had to come up with a script due to a lack of organisation which let us down. We attempted to make the script as close to the storyboard in the short time we had however time management and communication let us down. 

We received a few other types of audience feedback such as comments directly onto our blog which were similar comments made whilst we carried out these questionnaires with similar group members within our class. These pie charts below are also other pieces of audience feedback which helped us to improve certain aspects of our film, poster and even review.