1. Evaluation 3
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Target audience:
Our target audience consisted of both males and females within the age category
of 12-30. The reason why we chose the lowest age to be 12 was because our film
had some features which made our film a 12A film, such as the use of drugs (our
characters chemotherapy) and the reference to death. Therefore we couldn’t risk
making the age category lower in case we have elements which are
inappropriate for younger people.
The reason why we chose the highest age category to be 30 was because,
according to multiple statistics, people beyond the age of thirty don’t engage in
watching films as much as someone is 30 or below does. We didn’t want to end
up targeting people who wouldn’t watch our film, so we stuck with an age range
where we knew we could definitely reach eager people.
Also, when researching our target audience, we decided to include socio-
economic groups to help us reach out to more people. We decided to include
people within the group C1 – D.
How did we gather feedback from our target audience?
Pre-production
Questionnaires- the main way we were able to reach out to our target audience
was to create a pre-questionnaire. The questionnaire was conducted on a
website called Survey Monkey, which allows people to take the questionnaire,
which benefits us because we would be able to gather the data and analyse our
audience’s opinion. The purpose of creating a questionnaire was to get a rough
idea about our target audience, what films they like to watch, their opinion on
short films, and what they thought of the concept of our film because our
questions were based around our production. Some of the important questions
we asked included ‘does the name ‘Remember Me’ link well with the synopsis?’
and ‘does the narrative make sense?’
Asking questions in regards to your productions title and synopsis is important
because if there’s one thing an audience would remember about a film it’s the
title. If our title doesn’t link to the synopsis, it could confuse our audience and it
would make it hard for our audience to remember the film if there isn’t a clear
link between the two. Asking about the narrative is also important because it
gives us a good indication of if our story makes sense if it doesn’t and it hard to
interpret, it could prevent people from watching it again or recommending
anyone else to watch it. We took all of our responses into account because we
had to make sure our production made sense to someone who didn’t work on it.
A film which was a great influence on our film was The Fault in Our Stars
because it also had references to terminal illness which made it a 12A film. By
2. using this film as an inspiration, we were able to use this film as a guide to help
us promote our film in the right way to market our film. After doing more
research on how the film was marketed, we discovered that it was able to
promote itself most on popular social media apps such as YouTube. Since this
film is really similar to our film, we decided to use the same target audience since
both of our films deal with the same issues although we have different
narratives. His enabled us to have a rough idea on how to target our own
audience.
After receiving our first feedback, it made us look at our original planning and
research to see if we could add something to suit everyone in our target
audience. In order to provide everyone with a character they could relate to, we
added two of our main actresses friends to the plot, we added a brief mention of
Claire’s mum, and we also added Claire’s older sister to the story. Initially, we
only had one friend of Claire’s, and her mum, but we felt that the best way to
reach out to more people was to have more relatable characters.
Once we had all the feedback, we looked more specifically at the second
question, which was ‘how old are you?’ and we found that most of our audience
was between the age categories of 12-16. When we realised that most of our
audience was made up of young teenagers we had to devise a way to reach out to
them as well as reaching out to our older audience members. This influence our
marketing strategy and made us decide to use social media as our main source of
exhibiting our film since most social media users are teenagers, as well as adults.
When looking at our data, we were able to tell if our responses were reliable if
more than one person voted for that specific option. For example, on question
eight of our questionnaire, which says ‘does the narrative make sense?’ only one
person voted that it didn’t make sense, whilst nine people said it did make sense.
So because the people who said that our narrative did make sense was more, we
were able to determine that the data collected was reliable.
Post-production
Questionnaires- after making our production we sent out another set of
questions on Survey Monkey for our target audience to answer. The reason
behind conducting a post-production questionnaire was to gather some feedback
after making small adjustments to our main idea after receiving the pre-
production feedback. We learned from our first experience with survey monkey
that it’s good to consider your audience’s opinion of your film because they are
watching it from a different perspective and with different experiences, so we
were able to gather efficient information to be able to adjust our final
production.
Best way to reach our audience: After conducting some research and
discovering that most of our target audience was made up of teenagers and
young adults, we decided that the best platform to reach them would be social
media. This decision was made based on the fact that we are a technology
dependent generation, which means people are frequently on social media. This
decision was also based on a theorist who I researched for audience theory
3. named Clay Shirky. He said the internet and digital technologies have a profound
effect on the relations between media and individuals, therefore we as
consumers are more likely to use the internet to respond to texts. With this in
mind, we decided to reach out to our target audience through social media
websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Facebook is a good platform for us to use because Facebook is one of the most
used websites, therefore we would be able to advertise our film to a large
audience in one go. Twitter is a beneficial website for us to use because Twitter
has a term called ‘retweeting’ which is a method used to re-post an original
tweet, this means that with little effort we could send out some information
about our film and get it retweeted by people who like our film. When people
retweet it notifies their followers about it, which means the people that follow
them will also see our message and so on, so twitter helps to send a message to
groups of people efficiently and quickly. YouTube is also a great way to promote
our film because our audience would have access to the film, so they can watch it
without any hassle. Above all, using social media is not only quick but is also
cheap and cost-effective as we can reach out to many people without spending
any money.
When doing my ancillary tasks for the first time, I received a lot of criticism for
them from my teacher and friends. Some of the feedback from them stated that
my magazine review didn’t look professional, the image uses on my film review
was too basic, my film poster didn’t represent the genre, and my film poster was
too simple. With this in mind, it helped me to improve my final products to make
it what it is today. I was able to take the feedback on board and I prove my work
to a better standard that I’m more proud of. Having other people give me verbal
feedback helped me because they were able to point out things that they noticed
that I never realised was wrong.
When we gave in the first draft of our film to our teacher, we were able to sit
down with him and go through our production in detail so he could give us
feedback and improvements. This benefited us because it motivated us as a
group to do better and try and get the best grade we could for our production.
Receiving feedback and acting upon it is the only way we can improve our work
and learn from our mistakes.
Receiving the feedback on both my ancillaries and my film, when they were all
given in the first time, enabled me to see the main weakness with all of them
which was the fact that they were all too basic and they needed developing. After
taking time to improve each piece until they were all at the same standard and
they complimented each other, I was able to have more strengths to my pieces
rather than weaknesses.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, I was happy with the outcome and the feedback I received in the
end because it was mainly positive when it came to my ancillaries and my short
film. Overall I’m pleased with our short film as it incorporates every aspect we
wanted, and it also has a deeper meaning to it which can be interpreted in
4. different ways by our audience. Based on the feedback I received if there was
anything I would improve, it would be more movement shots to help present the
narrative in a different way other than with words. Receiving audience feedback
helped to form a solid foundation for me to work on and constantly improve to
make sure I had work that was representative of my genre and effective when
attracting my target audience.
The Video Below:
The video was an example of a member who fits into our target audience range
and their opinion on our production. Conducting this interview was beneficial
for me as it gave me a rough idea of how a person responds to my short film and
their opinion on certain aspects.
Strengths:
Target audience: the person being interviewed was within our target audience
range.
Genre: the interviewee was able to identify the genre accurately.
Sound: the direct address used by the interviewee engages the audience.
Weaknesses:
Target audience: only one person was interviewed therefore it doesn’t show a
realistic view of what other people’s opinion would be.
