Oscar Martin Media Evaluation A2 Q3

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback

Audience feedback is very important for improvements and to understand what your target audience really wants, I am lucky enough to have a large family so during the christmas period I asked for their honest opinions on the faceless man. To do this without confusion I wrote a survey with three questions to answer after everyone watched the film I gave them a sheet with these questions asking them to tick which answer suited them the most.
Our target audience was 18-36 years olds, therefore I only asked those in the relevant age bracket concluding in 25 people answering my survey across the Christmas period.
I told my family and friends that honesty is key in this survey so there could be no bias thoughts or feelings attached. As you can see above is the results of the survey.

Question 1 was a simple question just asking if they enjoyed the film and the results were mainly positive with 6/10 being the most common result appearing on the survey, I believe this is a good result if you take into consideration the zero budget and short time period to make this film but it does also show that there is room for improvement which leads nicely to question 2.

Question 2 was a question on how to improve our short film with seven available options to pick. As the survey portrays the confusing ending option was the most ticked option on the survey with 18 out of 25 people agreeing with a confusing ending 6 people saying better acting and 1 person wanting an improved soundtrack.
I'll start with the sound improvements, I asked why they wanted to improve the soundtrack and they said it was too loud and hard to hear people talk, I explained it was meant to be loud as it would drown out the dialogue making it seem only Alex really remembers the Faceless Man and the conversation was irrelevant but its a valid point none the less.
People who said improved acting is totally understandable and I was surprised more people didn't go for this option as no one who performed in the film were actors as it was a zero budget production we couldn't hire anyone. Therefore the six people who said acting needed improving are completely correct.
Eighteen people said it was a confusing ending and I can understand why to a certain extent. The film was always meant to create enigma therefore being interpreted in different ways but I can also see how this is confusing. The three main interpretations we thought we would have on the film is Psychiatrist being the faceless man and actually hunting Alex, The psychiatrist having a brother who is hunting Alex and he's in on it as well for an unknown reason or the real ending we wanted and hoped everyone would understand is that none of this is real and all in his head.
I spoke to a few of these people after and a lot of them understood it was to do with mental illness but felt it wasn't clear between the psychiatrist and the Faceless Mans connection.
This is something in the future I will definitely learn from and look to improve in the future as the ending to a film can be the most important part to the whole film.  

Question 3 was simply asking if they would ever choose to watch it from looking at the Poster, This was the most positive question where 22 of the 25 people said from looking at the poster I made they would watch the film. This is good to reflect on the positives and tells me that the poster was something that was a huge success.

Then as a group we asked other groups if they would write what they thought of our film on the blog allowing us too take their feedback and further improve.

This is from another group in our class where they are listing positives and negatives, the positives show that we took time to think of filming location and that we spent a lot of time in the post production of editing too but here they talk about the title where they say the title sequence looks as if it was used to fill time. We did indeed make the title a bit longer just to fill time but we tried making it still seem watchable with the numbers counting down before the title appears on screen but yes in the future we should of planned everything more precisely so the audience don't have to sit through a long intro. They speak about how the ending is confusing but effective. I believe this is a positive as that was the idea of the film all along to confuse people into thinking multiple alternative possibilities for what the ending means.  

This group like the others gave some positives and some negatives about the film. They start off by talking about the Soundtracks which they thought were excellent, which is nice to know as it took a very long time for me to find the appropriate soundtracks and then layer different ones over existing sound to emphasise a specific scary moment in a certain scene. Its good to know people understood this was about mental health and insanity and like the way we showed that with the editing and that they appreciated the storyline as that is a very important element. 

Here they also spoke about how the dialogue in the first scene was unclear this was possibly because during production we realised our voice recorder wasn't working so we had to use the camera's mic to pick up sound. We know this isn't very good so in the future we will check the mic the day before and also bring multiple microphones if possible but under zero budget that can be quite difficult.  

The scary laughter being funny is a point I was surprised by but none the less I have tried to find out why, I believe it could be interpreted as funny because it was a scream from garageband and not done first hand but we will next time watch over a scene excessively if we included a scream as laughing ruins the whole feel and eeriness of the film and thats the main aspect.   

In this feedback the group tell us how they found it interesting throughout but like the other groups the dialogue contrasted with the sound was their biggest issue. How it was originally intended was to be like that on purpose as during the flash back Alex is so consumed by fear and can only think about the faceless man everything else becomes a blur hence also with the disorientated filters but because multiple groups have picked up on this we will not use that technique again. 

  The Last post from the last group was a positive one and spoke about how they liked the soundtrack and editing because of the tension it formed as well as the concept behind hiding the psychiatrists face which is a major concept of our film so I'm glad it paid off. 

Overall My family Members and friends found the ending the part which needed the most improving and my classmates overall decided the dialogue most needed to improve.

I Believe my family chose the ending and my class mates didn't is because we are media students who are taught to dissect films so its easier for us to understand. The media students could tell we didn't use a microphone for our dialogue so made that one of our biggest negatives because they can tell the difference just like we can. Both points equally valid and further proves how important audience feedback really is.