Evaluation question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedbackAudience feedback plays an incredibly important role. My chosen demographic happened to be my age group, and therefore my classmates were part of this target and I was able to use their constant feedback so that I was able to improve all of my production pieces based on their opinions as I created them.

Firstly, I come up with the idea for my film, and decided what demographic this would suit best, basing it off of the other short film I had studied and used as inspiration. I then made a questionnaire in order to gain a better understanding of my demographic, and how age and gender affects taste in films and what they look for. The questionnaire gave me quantifiable results in which I could use based on the audience’s different preferences. For example, I asked whether the plot or characters was the most important to them, and it was evenly divided between them two answers and ‘don’t mind’ therefore I tried to make sure that I had both an interesting plot but also good characters to drive the story forward. This, to an extent meant that even though most of my interviewees were of a similar age, their preferences were not unanimous, therefore, whatever I have focused on more, large portion of my demographic will be left slightly disappointed.

Audience was particulary beneficial during the construction of my ancillary tasks. For instance, during the process of my poster I finished my first cut before asking my demographic for their thought and what I should change:

One criticism I had was that the credits were too narrow and thick, and that they needed to be stretched out

Many of my demographic said that the design of the title was a bit bland, the font was boring and the white opposed the darker tone of the picture. With one person saying “a tagline isn’t necessary, if you want it to be mysterious, it could take away from that”

An aspect that was consistently praised was the main image, my audience had no criticisms and said the picture worked very well with my film

Using this feedback, I made adjustments to the poster and improved it to better suit my demographic and make the overall quality higher:

I changed the font of the title before changing its colour. I wanted a deep red colour as it can connote many things such as blood. Also I believe the slight glow around the edges accentuates the whole heading making it more prominent and stand out more.

Jugding by the success I had with my second ancillary task (which I did first), I took a similar to my double page spread; after making significant changes I would ask members of my demographic for their opinions, to see what they liked, what they didn’t like and If I could

add any features that would expect or want to have. Using their feedback after each stage I made changes to better my product, even creating a Prezi, describing and going systematically through all the changes and feedback I received.

This method I had a better way of checking my progress having all the comments and stages in one place so that I could do all the improvements I could possibly make.

An example of this was after my second cut. I asked two of my classmates, Arnold and Joe (as previously mentioned, fit my demographic) commented how I needed to add more colour to make the page seem a little more active nd interesting. They also said this would be helped if I introduced more pictures of th film or behind the scenes, as there was too much writing and made everything seem more dull than it should have been.

Very much like both of my ancillary’s I have been relying on constant feedback to make my film as high quality as possible. Whenever I made any changes I would ask members of my

demographic/classmates for their advice. For instance, after some more research I looked into colour corrections and thought it would be best (with a suggestion from Kiera) to add a tint to the ghost world to make it seem abnormal from the real world. I went for a blue tint and decided to enlist the help from my demographic to choose how prominent the tone should be. I gave them a few options and they voted on the one they preffered the most, which then became a feature throughout the film.

This became one of the most important aspects of the film, as I believe it made the tone far more serious and slightly meancing which was my intention, and solidified it as a psychological thriller, as this form of colour scheme is a common convention of the genre. I continued this with the colour correction of the memories as I wanted them to juxtapose the

ghost world as much as possible. My target audience suggested that I use a lighter orange tint as that, tonely, gives a completley different feel to the blue tint.

For the final cut I enlisted the help of Arnold to get his overall thoughts, as shown by the voice recording I posted as part of my

blog post. He told me that he liked the film and visually its really good, however the final death scene was his biggest issue, although in the monlogue Lewis says that he doesn’t

remember the blood, Arnold still felt it would be best to have some sort of visual representation that the characters are actually dead rather than it being explained in the monolgue. I do agree with in part with this, and is something I can use going forward and remember in my future products.

Overall audience feedback is one of the most important aspects of film creating as without their imput and suggestions, the film would no have been able to reach its current level of quality let alone appeal to the demographic that I would be trying to entice.