Evaluation - Question 3

Evaluation - Question 3By Callum Mitchell

What have you learned from your audience research?

Originally we looked at the brief for the short film and developed our storyline based around those guidelines. After we had developed our general storyline and plot we decided to make a questionnaire interviewing fellow students as to what they thought about the storyline. The reason we did this was to get initial thoughts of our storyline and see exactly what people thought of it before we continued. We asked our target audience to get the right responses and we asked now so that we had the ability to change the storyline to better suit the needs of the target audience as we had time to change it.Pre production

Looking at the video, we found that people liked the storyline and understood it. Most people thought it was Clever and understood the play on words that we used to make the short. This really helped us develop our storyline further so we can create a good short film suited to our target audience.

We also did two online questionnaires to fully see what our audience wanted because we felt that the more research we had the better off we were. To the right is the answers from our first questionnaire. This gave us so much information about what they want to see and what they dont. We took a lot from this to help us in our filming stage. One thing we did learn was that the gender of our target audience was mixed both male and female. This meant that our film had no specific gender role therefore we left it out of further questionnaires.Pre production

This is the second questionnaire aimed at different people asking a few similar questions but trying to get a few different answers. The reason for this is because we felt that there was more to know about our target audience than we already had. We also asked this time what our audience wouldnt like to see so we know what to avoid.Pre production

The questionnaires were really useful to us as it showed us exactly what the target audience wanted so we could shape our film around that. One example is. The picture below shows a bar chart explaining what the audience dont want to see in our film. This helped us an awful lot in terms of shaping our film. The main thing people didnt want to see was sexual scenes, followed by romance. Because of that we didnt include a romance within our film at all, cancelling out the two things people didnt want within our film. We also didnt include a happy ending. The research helped us out a lot in shaping the film.Responding to this

We decided to make a questionnaire whilst we were producing the film. For this, we exported a rough cut and showed our audience and asked for their views on the rough cut. The feedback we got was quite supportive yet also not very helpful however this was expected as the clip that we showed was only 3 minutes long and missed out a lot of the film so it was only considered natural that people would be confused but nevertheless, we needed to make sure we were heading in the right direction. One response was for the music. This wasnt something we heavily researched before but having heard peoples responses that helped to shape the rest of the film music related. I feel that although the responses were limited, we learned a lot.Production

As soon as we completed our film and distributed it we then proceeded to create another online questionnaire asking our target audience what they liked and didn't like about our short film. The questions itself were pretty simple, just questions about what they enjoyed. This was more of an evaluation of the film rather than a questionnaire to learn from and change aspects of the film. We werent changing the film now so we just wanted peoples opinions. On the film itself. Most people seemed to like the film and seemed to think that it worked really well. Thanks to our last questionnaire we wanted to evaluate how well the music and sound went down in the film and people were predominantly pleased with the music and sound. This made us feel a lot better as we were worried our little efforts in the sound department lowered the film, but we were ok!Post Production

In conclusion I feel that the audience feedback was absolutely vital to the completion of our film. I think that theres a lot of tings we missed which the audience picked up on and that helped shape the film. An example is, originally we had a romance between Steve and another character but we completely forgot we were doing a short and wouldnt have had time to tell the story whilst also incorporating this romance within the film. Thanks to the audience saying they were not too keen on seeing a romance this lead us to change the storyline a little so that that was taken out. I feel this helped shaped the filming as we had enough problems with the actors as it was and incorporating another one would have made it worse so even just a simple audience suggestion helped with the shooting of the film. I also think it was essential to get views during the filming and editing of our short. This is because we need to know were heading in the right direction otherwise we could have encountered some major problems. The audience responded in different ways to different trials of the film process as there were different answers throughout all the questionnaires. Many people thought it to be a 12a rating after seeing the storyline, after seeing the rough cut thought it was a PG and after seeing the final release agreed it was a 15 so I found it interesting to see the change in answers at different types of the film process. One thing I do wish though is that we had more questionnaires or videos about other aspects of the film such as the poster or radio trailer. I feel that If we would have had more research before we would have been better at producing ancillary texts. Also I would have liked to know what people thought to the poster and radio trailer. If we would have had more time I think this would have been a good idea but we didnt. Next time Id do that. That being said I feel that we had a lot of research that all helped to shaped our short film. Thank you to anyone who helped us with this,Conclusion