1. Evaluation - Question 3
By Callum Mitchell
What have you learned from your audience research?
2. 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.
3. 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 don’t. 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
4. 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 wouldn’t like to see so we know
what to avoid.
Pre production
5. 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 don’t want to see in our film. This helped us an
awful lot in terms of shaping our film. The main thing people didn’t want to see was sexual scenes, followed by romance. Because of that
we didn’t include a romance within our film at all, cancelling out the two things people didn’t want within our film. We also didn’t include
a happy ending. The research helped us out a lot in shaping the film.
Responding to this
6. 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 wasn’t 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
7. 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
weren’t 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
8.
9.
10. In conclusion I feel that the audience feedback was absolutely vital to the completion of our film. I think that there’s 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 wouldn’t 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 we’re 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 didn’t. Next time I’d 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
