Audience feedback is significant as the audience bring in the revenue and makes your work credible. It also helps gain publicity because if they are pleased with your work, then positive messages would spread. The main aim of an editor/producer/director is to fulfil their audience’s satisfactions. The audience is the reason for making a film, they are the deciding factor as to whether your work is a success or not, therefore making sure you take in your audience’s feedback is absolutely essential.
How we went about getting audience feedback:
Questionnaire - My preferred use of gaining audience feedback was through questionnaires as it does not put pressure on the audience. By ensuring that the audience do not feel pressured, the feedback given back would be unbiased, honest and accurate because not only will the audience know they will be anonymous, it also does not require communication between the producer and the audience, making the audience feel comfortable with expressing the truth. Another reason why I prefer questionnaires is because they can be designed by using closed questions with yes or no answers making feedback easy to go through, or even open questions allowing audience to give advice as to how it can be improved. As our film will not be a big Hollywood Blockbuster, the amount of people whom I have given the questionnaires to will be a lot smaller. We gave questionnaires to 20 people, making sure we gave them out equally (10 to males and other 10 to females) and we also made sure they were not all the same age. By handing them out equally, we were able to gain a general feedback. However, this questionnaire was made before our trailer was even made as we wanted what our target audience would expect and want to watch in a gangster trailer, giving us ideas and understanding of their needs and wants.
Test screenings - this is where an audience is asked to watch the film before it is released and they must comment on good and bad points, these points are then taken into account and the product may be re-edited. We used this method in class and showed our peers and teachers, mine and my group's complete package to see what they thought of it. We handed out paper for them so they could write their opinions down if they were not brave enough to speak their mind, therefore by writing on a piece of paper without including their names will make the results, again, accurate and honest.
YouTube - this is a site that allows you to share videos that could be watched by people from different countries. It is the second most visited site in the world, with 790 million visitors and 100 billion pageviews. By uploading it onto Youtube, we were able to grasp not only our peers' comments, but also feedback from absolute strangers. We thought that the feedback from YouTube will not only be completely honest as the people do not know who we are and vice versa, so there would be no pressure for them to be kind.
Facebook - this is the world's largest social network, with over 500 million users. It connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. We decided to upload our trailer video onto our own facebook page to gain quick feedback from family and friends. Because we have 4 members in our group, we decided to share the video so we'd gain more feedback. This was effective as we gained a good amount of comments and likes however it is questionable as to how reliable the comments are.
Family and friends - In my free time, I went around with my laptop at school to ask feedback from people and when I was at home, I made my family, boyfriend and his family to watch and give feedback. Comparing to my friends' feedback to my family (& boyfriend's), I trust my family's as they would be honest without worrying about how I feel. By using this approach, I was able to gain more feedback for my group.
Results:
Questionnaires - The questionnaires showed that the majority would want to see blood and violence in a gangster film as it is a typical convention of it. They all said that choosing this genre is very brave and interesting, and that they would really want to watch it. If I had a chance to do this task again, I would make another questionnaire for the target audience after they have watched the package to see what they thought of it. We chose to not make one as many claimed that it was boring, and like a chore, therefore we decided to eliminate this approach and used others instead.
Test screening - The picture below shows how many feedback we received from our class. The majority of them were very positive with many praising the conventions used which reflected the genre well. Some of the other positive feedbacks were:
'The title is not that apparent it could stay up for longer.' - My thought on this is that the title lasted for about 3-4 seconds, enough time for the audience to read three words. I also think this criticism did not make my group to change the length of the title because not only do we feel that it is long enough, the way in which we used red for the font instead of white like the other texts. We also used a special effect to make the title look as if it was bleeding, an effect that it apparent enough to show that it is distinguishable from the dissected quote in the trailer.
YouTube - this is a site that allows you to share videos that could be watched by people from different countries. It is the second most visited site in the world, with 790 million visitors and 100 billion pageviews. By uploading it onto Youtube, we were able to grasp not only our peers' comments, but also feedback from absolute strangers. We thought that the feedback from YouTube will not only be completely honest as the people do not know who we are and vice versa, so there would be no pressure for them to be kind.
Facebook - this is the world's largest social network, with over 500 million users. It connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. We decided to upload our trailer video onto our own facebook page to gain quick feedback from family and friends. Because we have 4 members in our group, we decided to share the video so we'd gain more feedback. This was effective as we gained a good amount of comments and likes however it is questionable as to how reliable the comments are.
Family and friends - In my free time, I went around with my laptop at school to ask feedback from people and when I was at home, I made my family, boyfriend and his family to watch and give feedback. Comparing to my friends' feedback to my family (& boyfriend's), I trust my family's as they would be honest without worrying about how I feel. By using this approach, I was able to gain more feedback for my group.
Results:
Questionnaires - The questionnaires showed that the majority would want to see blood and violence in a gangster film as it is a typical convention of it. They all said that choosing this genre is very brave and interesting, and that they would really want to watch it. If I had a chance to do this task again, I would make another questionnaire for the target audience after they have watched the package to see what they thought of it. We chose to not make one as many claimed that it was boring, and like a chore, therefore we decided to eliminate this approach and used others instead.
Test screening - The picture below shows how many feedback we received from our class. The majority of them were very positive with many praising the conventions used which reflected the genre well. Some of the other positive feedbacks were:
- 'Text in between informs and helps break the clips up.'
- 'I think I prefer the close up mag cover. The colours tie in much better than the grey one and the title of the film stands out better.'
- 'Complied with conventions.'
- 'Cuts and music convey genre.'
- 'Camera control is very good.'
- 'It is quite short making you want to see what happens.'
- 'I like how there is no dialogue.'
- 'Own music works brilliantly.'
- 'Use of slow-mo and fast paced shots of London show portrayal of time.'
'The title is not that apparent it could stay up for longer.' - My thought on this is that the title lasted for about 3-4 seconds, enough time for the audience to read three words. I also think this criticism did not make my group to change the length of the title because not only do we feel that it is long enough, the way in which we used red for the font instead of white like the other texts. We also used a special effect to make the title look as if it was bleeding, an effect that it apparent enough to show that it is distinguishable from the dissected quote in the trailer.
'Maybe there needs to be a little bit of dialogue.' - As I have already said in my previous blog, we did think about including dialogue, however we decided to deviate from mainstream trailers and make it unique showing our originality and courage. Another reason is because we do not have specific instruments in order to make the voice over sound professional, we also did not want to include dialogue as we were worried it would sound tacky.
'Not long enough for gangster trailer.' - Although there are some gangster trailers that are particularly long, we made our own short because it was to give the audience a little teaser in order to lure them into wanting to watch our film. It was also due to the fact we had limited shots, making it almost impossible for us to make it longer. However, I am totally convinced that the length of our trailer is appropriate and enough to attract our target audience.
'Not sure if the music works?' - We chose to use two different non-diegetic soundtracks in order to set a different mood. The first soundtrack is upbeat, creating a content atmosphere. This decision was intended to mislead the audience, making them feel that the film will be happy, challenging the typical expectations of a gangster film. However, we then used a slow song sung by a friend of ours throughout the rest of the trailer. The song matched well with the shots, particularly the slow-motion shots, and I also feel that it symbolises the slow pace of the main character's life making him lose his sanity. The lyrics also show it as it has strong connotations of violence. We also did not think about changing the music as the spectator herself is not certain whether she dislikes it, and a number of spectators praised the choice of using two soundtracks.
'Don't overly understand why it's rated 18, considering that the trailer doesn't show any violence.' - The film is rated 18 as the scenes in there will contain explicit violence and bad language which would offend and affect the younger audience. The trailer does show some violence as blood is very present in the trailer and the shot of one of the gangsters stamping is clearly not a non-violent person would do. We did not show any dead people or gory scenes as we made it clear on the BBFC certificate that this trailer is made for ALL audiences, which means that we had to be careful with what we were showing but also showing a necessary amount so our target audience would stay intrigued.
'They should have all been smoking or just one.' - All of the characters did not smoke or just one because I feel that it would be too stylised and staged. I think that by having random characters to smoke would create a sense of authenticity, making the audience feel that the characters are real and unaware of the camera being there. If all of the characters were smoking, the whole shot would not look right.
Going through all of the feedback from the test screenings, I made a pie chart so it would be easier for me and my group to see what people thought of our complete package.
As you can see, over 75% of the audience feedback are positive, making it clear that it was a success and our hard work has paid off.
YouTube/Facebook - I put Facebook and YouTube together as the YouTube video was put onto Facebook to gain more attention and feedback. The pictures below are screenshots of the feedback we gained. All of the comments below are positive and there are not any negative. On Youtube, there were around 110 views, with 5 likes and 2 dislikes. We also had one comment praising the music and the slow motion shots to match it.
Audience feedback has helped us as we were able to gain a general knowledge to fulfil our identified target audience's satisfactions. Although there were a few negative comments, we did not change our package as we strongly feel that every element and factor are effective and they linked well with the package making it look even more consistent and proficient.
No comments:
Post a Comment