The document discusses the various types of audience feedback the creator received during the process of making a short film. This included primary research like questionnaires, interviews, and a screening, as well as secondary research online. The feedback helped improve elements like the script, poster, and film itself by addressing things like character development, layout, and achieving the desired tone. The creator found the audience feedback invaluable for creating a successful final product that would appeal to their target demographic.

1. A 2 E VA L U AT I O N
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT FROM
YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

2. AUDIENCE FEEDBACK
Throughout the research, planning, production and evaluation stages of
my product I have sought audience feedback to check that I am appealing
to my target audience which is 19 -25 year olds, mixed gender. I did this
because I feel that audience feedback is invaluable when you are trying to
target a specific demographic because if your target audience isn’t
interested in your film, it is almost certainly destined for filmic failure.
Conducting audience research throughout the process of creating a short
film allows you to realise and correct any mistakes made along the way,
helping to create a more successful end product.
I have used different methods of research to obtain both qualitative and
quantitative feedback.
The majority of my research is primary research which I have conducted
myself, but I have also used secondary research to create my product as I
have reviewed similar products to mine online and looked at comments to
see what other people thought of them. However, my primary research
has been the motivation for the majority of the tweaks made to my final
product.

3. WHAT MAKES A GOOD SHORT FILM?
INTERNET RESEARCH
QUALITATIVE DATA
During the research stages of my production, I researched on the Internet what exactly makes a good short
film. This was secondary research, as I was looking at someone else’s data and interpreting it for my own
benefit. I found that some of the main factors that contribute towards producing a successful short film,
according to the BFI, are: an exciting storyline, a strong beginning, a strong script, good acting, good
collaboration and an end product which is kept short.
When it came to the planning and construction stages of production I tried to incorporate all of these
elements in order to produce a successful product.
We rejected many film ideas we came up with as a group because they weren’t exciting enough, until we
came up with Lost in the Eve and saw its potential to be dynamic, interesting and gripping. We then made
special effort to plan the opening sequence of our short film to make sure it was “strong”, and I then started
to write the script and seek feedback to make sure it was also “strong”. Next, we held auditions so that we
could find the best actors and actress for our short film as possible. I also feel that we have worked well as a
team throughout. We managed to overcome some difficult obstacles (described in problems faced whilst
filming posts, including actors not knowing their lines, actress changes and commitments that meant that
members of the group couldn’t always make it to the shoots) that were put in our path and pull through as a
group. Furthermore, we were able to delegate well within the group, playing to our strengths, and we all
reviewed each other’s contributions and made suggestions and improvements to get our work to the highest
standard we possibly could. The only thing that we perhaps didn’t completely manage was keeping our short
film short, but that’s because of the initial slow pace that we were trying to create for a dramatic effect.
However, we kept our film under 30 minutes successfully, which is the cut-off point for short films at short
film festivals.

4. TARGET AUDIENCE RESEARCH
QUESTIONNAIRE
QUANTITATIVE DATA
Before we came up with our final idea, we decided to construct a questionnaire which we then
handed out to 50 people at random, in order to reach a variety of people and find out who
watches short films, and what they enjoy about them.
We then analysed the quantitative data we received and presented it in the form of graphs
and pie charts so that we could clearly see which demographic watches the most short films,
and why. We found that both genders watched short films fairly evenly throughout the age
groups, but considerably more 19-25 year olds claimed to watch short films than any other
age group and this is one of the main reasons we decided to target this age group.
We also found that the most attractive part of a short film is the storyline for most people, and
so it was important for us to come up with a storyline that would grab our audience’s attention.
This is why we have included a big twist in our plot. In addition, we found that the most
popular genre of short film is drama, especially for our target demographic and we therefore
created a dramatic storyline.
Most people said that they watch short films online, and this impacted on our decision to
distribute our film online, via YouTube because we felt that this would not only be cheaper and
beneficial for our small budget, but it would also reach more people interested in watching our
short film.
You can see the full analysis of our data on my post named ‘Researching into Our Target
Audience (Questionnaire Analysis)’.
This research taught me where I should target my product, what sort of film I should create
and how would be best to distribute it. It was an extremely important piece of research.

5. SCRIPT INTERVIEW
QUALITATIVE DATA
When I had finished writing the script, I wanted to receive some feedback on it to check that I was portraying
the themes, ideas and characters like I intended to and so I devised several questions to ask a variety of
different people to see what they thought. The questions included “describe the narrative in three words”,
“did it keep you in suspense” and “could you suggest any improvements for the script?”.
I decided to record the interviews as evidence for my blog, but also so that I could look back on them when
creating my final product and remind myself of what people liked, and also what they didn’t like.
From this interview I learnt that in a lot of ways, my first draft of the script was successful because people
seemed to think that it fit the correct genre, flowed well and also used appropriate words to describe the
narrative. However, when asked about what we could improve, most people said the same thing – I needed
to work on the characters slightly. The main comments were about David and Richard and suggested that I
made David more versatile in his emotions and up and down when he finds out about Richard seeing Eve,
to make his reaction more dramatic and realistic, and also to reinforce Richard as a friendly, colloquial old
man who isn’t a threat to Eve. From this feedback I realised I needed to go over-the-top and present
Richard as a character who really loves his wife and goes on about her frequently to Eve so that he is
perceived to be friendly by the audience because the situation could be seen to be somewhat dangerous
because of realism. In the real world, girls get abducted by people who pick them up in vans. Nowadays, it is
uncommon to hear of a girl being rescued by a man in a van.
I took these comments and criticisms on board and re-drafted the script to include them. I then showed it to
the rest of my production group, who approved, and then showed it to a few more of my peers to see if they
agreed and they did, so after a little more fine tweaking, the script was given to the actors to make sure it
was clear. They read over it and said it was, and said they would go to begin learning their lines.

6. FILM POSTER CONVENTIONS RESEARCH
QUALITATIVE DATA
Before we began to create our film poster, we came up with two
different designs as a group. We sketched them out and we had
our favourite, but we decided to see what others thought was
the most effective. So, we asked 15 of our peers to choose one
and explain why they chose it. 12 out of 15 chose the design
with Eve sat on a rock, mainly because they thought it was
more aesthetically pleasing in general, but they said it also
looked more intriguing than the other design. The other 3 chose
the other design involving Eve and the campervan.
We have gone with the design that features Eve sat on the rock
like our primary research suggested we should. We also
preferred the rock design as we were able to include more
subtle connotations that didn’t give the plot away, and so we
decided to go with this design.

7. FILM POSTER QUESTIONNAIRE
QUANTITATIVE DATA
When we had finished our film poster, we decided to get some
feedback on it to see if there were any improvements or corrections
we needed to make in order to make it more effective and successful.
To do this, we stood outside a local shop and handed a questionnaire
out to the first 25 people who we saw within our age range, who would
participate. We then analysed the data and found that on the whole,
our poster achieved its purpose. We were pleased to find that 22 out
of 25 people liked the layout of our poster and 18 people said that it
definitely fit with our chosen genre of psychological thriller.
The positive feedback meant that there weren’t really any changes to
be made. We did receive some negative feedback, but we can’t
expect to appeal to everyone because everyone has different
interests.

8. FILM REVIEW INTERVIEW
QUALITATIVE DATA
When we had finished the first draft of our film review, we decided to
show it to a variety of people to see what they thought, so that we could
make any changes in line with any popular criticisms before finalising the
product. We got a lot of positive feedback from the interview, with most
people saying that the review would encourage them to go and watch our
film, but we also received some constructive criticism which we took on
board. For example, one person suggested that we should break the
chunks of text down further into more paragraphs to make it easier for the
audience to read. We made this change. Another person suggested that
we should add more photographs, but we decided that we would give too
much of the narrative away if we did this and therefore we decided not to.
This feedback taught me that the layout of a film review has more of an
impact on what people think of it and the film it is reviewing than the
actual text does. Therefore, we decided to tweak the layout slightly after
receiving this feedback to make our review more aesthetically pleasing
and appealing to our target audience.

9. FILM SCREENING QUESTIONNAIRE
QUANTITATIVE DATA
One of the most important pieces of audience feedback we received was from the screening
of our short film because it was the first time we had shown our completed film to a large
audience, after taking all other previous stages of audience feedback into account.
As you can see from our filming plan and my write-up of the screening, we showed the film to
an audience of just over 40 people, and handed a questionnaire out to the first 40 people who
showed up. We only invited our target audience to the screening as we felt it was more
important to receive feedback from them than anyone else as they are the demographic that
we want our product to appeal to.
Again, the feedback that we received was largely positive (which we were extremely pleased
about) and left us with few alterations to make. Although, we are aware that some of this
feedback could be biased as we invited friends and family to the screening, but we also
invited people that we didn’t know to receive some unbiased feedback as well.
Everyone who we asked said they enjoyed the film, and well over 30 people said that our film
“definitely” followed conventions of the psychological thriller genre, with nobody disagreeing
completely. We were also extremely pleased to see that over half of the guests thought that
the film was set in the late evening as this meant that our colour grading was somewhat
successful, but some people did think it was set in the morning, and others thought it was set
during the day and so we knew we needed to work on this slightly more, and so we did and
we feel that the final product is colour graded far better than it was before because of this
audience feedback, which has taught me just how valuable it is in creating a successful media
product.

10. IN CONCLUSION…
The audience feedback we have received has helped us
to improve our product throughout its different stages of
creation. It has also helped us to create a more successful
film poster and film review because we have listened to
our audience.
I am extremely proud of what I have managed to achieve
with the help of my group.