Evaluation Question 3

Q3:

What have you learnt for your audience feedback?

No matter what film you are making, weather it’s an independent film to a blockbuster audience feedback is a massive part of the filmmaking. The feed back we gain is used on the film to improve where it was needed, in order to create the better film, and consequently earn a better grade. We used our audience feedback in the Pre and Post production process of our films, this helped us gain a wider knowledge from the public, and fellow media students.
The first piece of feedback we received was from out pitch. We presented our pitch to our fellow classmates, the aims of our pitch was to get our story idea across, and what we wanted to do throughout the production process. In our pitch we wanted to be creative, to show our intent through our film, we also wanted to engage our audience. Because pitching to people who are disinterested and bored with the pitch and the idea would be a waste of our time, and theirs. Thinking of clever creative ways to include our classmates into our pitch was to have them take part in a ‘fake’ lottery game, we would give them each a lottery ticket with numbers already filled out with them, and playing a video on our pitch, the winner of the lottery won some sweets. This was a quick and fun way to start our pitch, engaging our audience quickly having their attention, and also involving them in the KEY theme of our film. So the lottery game was not irrelevant and off topic of the pitch. Likewise Josh from our group also studies Drama Studies, and was telling us about his lesson the week before, where their teacher got them to do role plays of certain characters from famous films and TV shows. This gave our group the idea of having our characters do role plays of our characters. This again made our audience laugh and relax while watching our pitch.
After our pitch was finished we had a question and answer section, this is where our fellow media students could point out the points they felt we missed, or what they never understood. We most common question we got asked was ‘What was the meaning behind our idea?’ or ‘What the main idea was?’. This showed us that next time we pitched we needed to make sure our idea and narrative was clearly broadcasted through our pitch so our audience understood. The positive feedback was how they all enjoyed getting involved and playing the lottery game, most of all the winner, and how they liked the role plays it made them feel as though they were witnessing the film idea 3D and in real life, this gave them an idea of what we wanted our characters to come across, this was a good thing to add to the pitch instead of reading and boring our audience with the character profiles.
As well as the role plays our audience suggested having a hot seat section with them being able to ask them questions, because their was many of things they wanted to know, but couldn’t ask. This was vital feedback from the audience, because after hearing this view we instantly felt it was a good idea that could work, and only improve our production. We included this into our 2nd pitch to the audience, they asked them questions about their lives, like asking where they worked, weather they went to school, background information which could give them an insight into the film. The hot seating was very comical, linking in with our genre, the characters were being rude, and lippy to the audience, making them laugh and join in joking around with them, this was making everyone in the room laugh, which is always our main aim in creating a comedy. It also allowed the audience to ‘guess’ what our genre was, this is important because it showed we met our aims and objectives of the pitch of them knowing the story, characters and the genre. These are the three main points of pitching to the audience for feedback.
We also used our fellow students for the feedback during the editing process. Throughout the editing process we showed them our film at different parts, this benefited us because they brought to our attention shots that never worked, and also shots that worked well. This was useful because we had not distributed the film and was still in the process of editing. Showing them our cowboy and chase (Scooby Doo) scenes, we wanted this music to be a variety, having 3 or 4 musical soundtracks changing throughout the film, brought our many themes in the film. Adding to the comical aspect of the film, with the changing of the songs, each adding their own background reason and comical to the film.