Question 3

What have you learned from you audience feedback?

Audience feedback is the essential part of the post production stages from of film and these feedbacks indicates the changes we will and would have to make during the filming and after the filming progress.

According to our genre I gathered a group of younger students from the school and got feedback from them on the first draft of our storyboard so they would get the ideal idea of what we were trying to portray in this film and its genre.

Our first initial idea was based on puberty dysfunction and this didn’t get the bests of responses which led us to changing the whole idea because our group of viewers told us that it wasn’t realistic enough. Student: “It sounded quite well however would be very difficult to show and portray manhood within “. The main reason why the story wasn’t really appreciated by the group was because it didn’t have any particular Unique Selling Point and it didn’t exactly fit in with the topic `Manhood`. The group told us that we could create a better story idea from the topic and we then had to discuss and broaden our knowledge about Manhood. From this first feedback we realised that we don’t have to make it so obvious because puberty is part of Manhood but we could create a creative film story and still bring out the same message.

The creativity in the film story would bring us a creative film and this is the progression we have to make from the basic AS skills to the advanced A2 skills and knowledge by applying more technological terms and using more technology and better story ideas for our target audience. This first final feedback gathered us together so we could great fresh new story ideas based on Manhood, Drama and relationships.

I personally did a block off collective research which is shown on my blogg and this brought us 2 new ideas which were 1. The story I came up with of a young man going to the army to gain his manhood back and he doesn’t tell anyone because we wants to come back proven everyone wrong.

2. There is married couple and the husband is a military man and he is called
out to go fight in the war against Afghanistan for UK. The tragedy starts from
there were by the wife is left along and she is pregnant as well however
he's been sent out to go fight several small wars but had returned home
nice and safely to see his wife's face again but this time he doesn’t come back. I pitched one of my ideas to the group and discussed on the idea if it was suitable to what we believed to achieve at the end of the year and the idea I told them about was the first one about the young man joining the army.

Reka and David came up with an idea which they had mixed together after the first feedback we got from the first story idea & pitch. We added in my part of the idea and came up with one whole new idea and pitch which we all felt happy about. We fixed up and make few changes to the idea which we presented to our classmates and teacher. Pitch, first script and treatment were finalised by us however we needed another set of feedback to make sure that we was on the line to success.

First response was “Increased improved from the first idea” we also received feedback on how the short – plot point in the story were very interesting and worked very well. The changes like changing the location for our main event to occur and using more suitable music & sound effects that were made and also the story was more organised, making the theme stand out throughout the treatment and we shortened the characters down to 3 main characters instead of 5.

Our audience feedback overall said that there was not any vital elements of the treatment that needed any major changes because from the first treatment we made a progressive change. We started off with 3 treatment ideas but because of the necessary feedback we received we mixed them down together and came up with the final treatment.

When we got back to the script we had to make a few major changes such as the text font of the script and the layout of the script because at first we didn’t follow the correct layout and format of a script but a student told us that it didn’t look too professional so we went back and did in depth research on how to layout a film script. Also it had to be presented as a silent film and shouldn’t contain too much dialogue so we had to clear out all the unnecessary dialogue and replace them with actions that would portray the same message and this was all achieved in our final draft and found to be more victorious so for instance when they were coming down the stairs in the morning instead of having them arguing or just shouting at each other we replaced it by Colin barging John half way down the stairs and then had a close of shot of John’s facial expression reaction towards what had just happened but this had to be shown in the script but not written out in full detail.

The final script was really improved from what we had been thinking of being before and from the audience feedback we got like: “Script looks more detailed and professional than the first one I saw”, “I like it because it shows that us have done more work to make improvements”, “Wow a real film script created by some one I know”.  These feedbacks gave us an insight on how there’s always room for improvement. Not only did we have our classmates and teachers look at the script we had the students and outside school friends look at it.  Audience feedback :” The audience wont know they are brothers, you need to show that they're related in some way and  haven't set up the difference and relationship between them both, I think you might need to a few extra scene, like for example the brother has friends to pick him up from school. There's not a strong representation of the favouritism between the mother and two sons.

The script seems a bit random, you need to tighten it and fill in the gaps.”

This feedback gave us a lot to do which meant we had to add in scenes were the favouritism for Colin is shown. Right from the beginning we haven’t this message to be clear so when Colin walks into the kitchen and gets his breakfast ready, Linda comes over and grabs the cereal box of him saying that she will prepare his breakfast for him. Then John walks in and his mother tells him to prepare his own breakfast this already portrays that Colin is more loved by Linda also on the table scene we see Linda pouring cereal into Colin’s bowl and John just watches them and he has to do everything himself.

Storyboard was our challenging area because we came out with the first final treatment and realised that things would have to be stating out on a storyboard and would have to follow the exact guidelines. For the storyboard I did a personal questionnaire based on four simple questions and gave it out to 10 different people who I spend most of my days with. Regarding the first four questions which involved the participants having to rate on a number of factors involving the quality of our storyboard and treatment from 1-5, (1 being the lowest, 5 the highest) there were a range of different opinions. To begin with, with the first question being “Does this look like a film storyboard to you?” there was an average rating of 4, with one participant circling 5, yet around four participants circling 2. Therefore, this shows the diverse range there are in participant’s opinions, with obviously the drama genre with a manhood themed story only appealing to certain sixth form students and friends. Also, this could perhaps be an indication of participant’s unique genre taste, as a female who could be fanatic about drama’s , relationships and family  would potentially find our treatment appealing, yet on the other hand a male who may only be interested in action films may not find our short film that interesting to watch when it had been released. With the feedback from our random sample we gathered that our storyboard was on the right track and were happy to continue to improve based on the feedbacks we got from other sixth form students.

As we were moving unto the next stages I started to realise that feedback was vital in everything we did especially because we were creating a product for the target audience and not for ourselves which may have seemed like the perfect story idea to ourselves just because we created them. During the finalising stage after I got the questionnaires I realised that we were missing a few shots in the storyboard like the shots of Colin Barging into John in the opening scene when they are coming down the stairs and also the shots of John walking in the road by himself as Colin and Friends walk straight past him and these shots were the most effective ones which none of us had noticed and also some of the shot angles mentioned in the storyboard wouldn’t work on location. Audience feedback told u that “A panning shot on that table wouldn’t work out but if we did it would look very ruff “ and also the scene were Colin’s friends are outside we wanted to do a birds eye view shot but that wouldn’t work on location at all so what I had to do it basically create a whole new storyboard from scratch with all the new cuts in them and after this was created we had to think of how we could make certain shots more interesting by adding in tilts, zooms, pans, spins, transactions etc.  We also thought about how to maintain these interesting shots in production and after this we showed a the same students & friends the storyboard again and got feedback like Jackson : “I like the fact that you started from plain again and built up on improvement I gave you”  

Once production was cleared out of the way we moved onto the editing process was we had major problems which we didn’t notice ourselves until we got feedbacks from our audience.

The technical issues were mostly to do sound and making sure we cut out the right shots to make the actual film size smaller within the rage of 4 to 5minutes.  For example when Linda was picking up the letter we didn’t have to show the post dropping into the house and she walking up to the door to pick it up because it would really be a waste of time that whole clip after 5 seconds would have gathered to the audience what it going on and this only came to our notice after the feedback we got. Audience feedback: “The opening credits and names aren’t enough” because we just had the 3 main characters names on the opening scene. We showed our audience the first draft of our edited film which was about 8 minutes.

“Some of the shots are not needed” so what we had to do is run through the film and cut short shots or shot that could be replaced.

 Continuing the process of trimming down the 25minutes of recordings down to 5 minutes the end product came out successfully.

During editing stage we had to find the matching music’s for our film which was a bit challenging because we didn’t want to use tragic music all the way through the film so I did some research on what would fit in with each scene.

I found some copy right free music online and downloaded them and got my partners to listen to them so we inserted them unto the film clip not realising that it wasn’t the ideal song for the film. We only discovered when one of our classmates said that the music was way to “Upbeat and Cheesy” for our film and because of this feedback I went back and did further research on the kind of mellow music that would fit in and I found the music on http://www.music4yourvids.co.uk/ they gave me a variety of genres that I could select from and I resulted with the right sound clip for certain scenes.  This showed me that music really portrays a lot that happens in a film and it would have to be a precise music to get the audience into the mood for example if our genre was Action it would be a adventurous upbeat thrillerly kind of sound were as for the drama it has to have some mellow and calm music inserted for example when John is walking to school we have the rap music fading down and then the tragic mellow music fades in when John is by himself it portrays how he is lonesome and sad.

At the last stage I had to use Adobe Photoshop CS4 to create my 3 film posters after the research I did on film posters so I could have the bright idea of what a real poster layout looked like.  Many of my classmates looked at several of my posters for example Poster 3 I had a black background with John & Linda hugging but after feedback I got from a few Year.10 students who told me that  the black background doesn’t really go with what we were trying to accomplish . They recommended that I used a lively background like water or skies and I decided to go for the skies/clouds because I noticed that black had nothing to do with relationships, drama and manhood were as the clouds represent peace, drama and freedom.  The background made a major difference and I noticed that the background place a big role in the poster format because it tells what is happening in the background and how it differences or is the same as the foreground image or colour.  Another feedback I got from one of the people in my production group was that I had to add in the tagline of the film because it follows the codes and convention of film posters. I did take this step and added in the tagline in the 3^rd poster showing that I took in the feedback and improved on it. The language I used on these posters had to be very clear fully selected and had to be the right words because these posters are the distributions of the final film and they are going to attract the audience to come and see the film so at the last stage I got 5 people to come and look at my final draft and tell me exactly what the thought of it. Feedback I got is :” I would surely watch the film if I saw the poster some were “,  “ I like the fact that its an amateur production but you have made the poster look so professional at a beginners stage”.

The main lesson I learnt from all this feedback is that there is always room for improvement and because media is based on people (audience) you will always need feedback, comments and suggestions from them to create the best media product there is so it would be suitable for your target market whether niche or mass audience.  Good feedback gives me the boost on continuing the further works on what I started and bad feedback makes me stronger and that all part of development when your skills are improving day by day just because of the things people say to you.