EVALUATION QUESTION 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The Audience Feedback is Crucial if you want to make a great film.

After we had finished each cut of the film we showed it to a target audience to see what there opinions were. This occurred right from the beginning when we were thinking up our initial ideas up to the final cut when we were trying to get the film finished to as high a quality as possible. We even changed our final cut last minute due to the creative arts evening at school when we go a lot of audience feedback from parents and other young adults which proved extremely useful. Here is a detailed analysis of how the audience feedback we collected influenced the entire creation of the film:

• Initial Ideas - Initially me and Alex created different ideas by ourselves which we then presented to an audience of our classmates. It turned out that my idea gained more positive audience feedback than Alex's due to it having "a better story-line" and "a cleverer twist" so we decided to use my idea and develop into it more, adding some of Alex's ideas that were good into my basic idea. After quite a few hours of tweaking and playing around with it we finally came up with our improved initial idea which we then presented to an audience again and received this audience feedback: - We should base our film around one central protagonist, the twist should only be revealed right at the end of the Film to gain maximum surprise with the audience, the main character should be an older teenager (not a teenager that still attends school) otherwise the mise-en-scene will not fit, you should definitely stick with the horror genre as you can bring in some quite dramatic and suspenseful scenes which will fit well with your twist. After taking all of these points into account we tweaked the necessary parts of our idea and were ready to present our Final idea and develop the Target Audience of our film.
• Final Idea - We took another group of people and presented our Final Idea to them to see what there opinions were on it. Overall they thought it was a great idea but some key points raised by them to consider were: - Whilst planning the narrative for our film we decided to have the central protagonist discover a dead body but try and help it up and the arm falls off in his hand to bring a comedy aspect to the film, which would appeal to a wider and more diverse audience. We were told that the idea wasn't really relevant to the narrative and we should leave it out to avoid confusion. - The audience felt that the central protagonist should spend more time searching the campsite to anchor his innocence and make it less obvious that he was really the killer. - The audience felt that there should be a dead body shown at some point during the campsite search to establish that this was a murder scene. - The audience felt that there needed to be more to make the central protagonist look up towards the house so we decided to use the sound of a crow to make the protagonist look up and see the smoke rising from the top of the house. We took these opinions into consideration and decided to follow them (even though we strongly disagreed with some of them) as we felt it was crucial to meet the expectations and more of the target audience and make the film understandable so as to not to develop a preferred reading within the audience which we don't want.
• Rough Cut - During this stage we felt that we gained the most valuable audience feedback as it directly affected the outcome of our final piece. Again, as before, we showed it to           

our target audience and this was the feedback we were given: - When we showed the Rough Cut the audience could still not understand why the Central Protagonist decides to go to the house so we added a difficult to obtain clip of a crow to show what he sees from a POV shot which draws his eye towards the house. - They also asked why does the central protagonist run away from the house? So we added the sound of a farmer and his dog to give the character a reason to run away giving the audience the preffered reading that the character has been scared off by someone who could be the killer. - They said that the preffered reading of the central protagonist being innocent is still not anchored enough, which is still a problem that we have not resolved yet, but we now know why this is. When the character is running away he just does not look scared enough giving the oppositional reading that he is not innocent so we have added the radio broadcasts but the broadcasts are from the future and with the audience thinking its currentit will anchor the fact that the centtral protagonist is innocent. - The scenes of the male running have clearly been sped up. We will re-film these parts if we re-submit in June. - The voice over created a sense of humor rather than scaring the audience. We will re-record this if we re-submit in June. - The dead character in the tent looks more funny than scary.We will re-film if we re-submit in June.

From all this Feedback we have improved our movie dramatically from what we intended it to be originally but hopefully keeping true to the some of the original content we came up with. As you can see from this last section of Audience feedback there have been a number of things highlighed that we can improve on so we have decided to re-submit in june. We feel that by doing this we can vastly improve our grade and the quality of the film making everything to the best of our abilitys which we intendeed to do when we started out originally. The scenes we intend to re-shoot are the running on the moors scenes and some of the ending scenes to make them much more dramatic.