Question 3

Question 3

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

Audience feedback is very important and essential because the film is being created for an audience and the aim is to meet their expectations for our genre (COMEDY). The whole purpose is for the audience to inform us on what else is needed for us to do to meet our goal and making the story clear to them. The first set of audience feedback I received was from several members of class in the pre -production stage (planning) for the Treatment, Script, Storyboard/Photo storyboard and Sound.

In creating the Treatment we had to pitch our ideas to several of our classmates. From this we received feedback on whether it sounded realistic; characters; whether the plot-points and story was stronger to carry out. It was explained to us that having to many characters may take long to film all them and may be complicated things as we are only doing a short film. The organisation of which the story had been written needed to be more simplistic and shown throughout the beginning till the end. On the other hand we also received good feedback on how the short plot-points in the story were very interesting and worked really well. It has a lot of potential and the ideas are adventurous. After receiving this feedback made changes to our treatment also changing the title from Heist to Switch. The changes that were made was that the story was more organised, making the themes stand out throughout the treatment. We decided to only use four characters, mainly comic duo/double act to save time and so it was easy to manage. Following this we then received feedback again from several classmates on our second treatment which was primarily positive. My classmate feedback overall said that there was not any vital elements of the treatment that need to be changed as the changes made from the first to second draft was successful.

Many changes were made to the Script before we came to our final one. We received feedback on our script which caused us to make changes three times some being just manor changes. The feedback we received was that there was too much dialogue and be a silent film there should not be too and should focus on mainly the visual elements. We therefore decided that we would have to cut down and exclude some of our dialogue; instead of them having speech used dialogue boxes. Adding no voiceover and including more action. This was all achieved in our final draft and found to be more victorious. We also had problem with location because we was unsure as it was brought to our notice by a member in our class that staging a hotel may “bring down the production value”. We made the decision to change the location and causing changes to our script but because of weather conditions on the day of shooting. We were unable to proceed and had to change it back to our original idea. Which we successful managed to pull off without bring down the production value.

The Storyboard/Photo storyboard many different feedbacks from members in class were given to us on whether the shot we chose to use was interesting, what could look better and what was not needed. Showing this to members in class and other media students, we found that some shots were either missing such as the shots of how the double act got to find the drugs. These basic or very interesting if we managed to pull it off in the production stage. From this we meet as a group and made changes by adding more shots, making the basic shots more interesting by adding tilts, zooms, pans etc. We also thought about how we would maintain these interesting shots in production. After re-showing our new storyboards we received positive feedback.

When researching the sort of Sound that is used in our genre, Comedy I found the soundtrack to be loud/upbeat, silly and crazy. The first few non-diegetic sound I found, fit these descriptions but after receiving the feedback from several members in my class saying that it portrayed but did not fit world of my story because even though my film was under the genre comedy it still had some elements of crime/action in it. I realised that overall this kind of music is the right theme and sound but at the same time it was too classical for the world of my film. I seemed to be too “Retro comical” and would best for a “black and white film”. It was also said that I would need to get upbeat/action music so I decided to make decision to look at comical action film like Snatch and Bad boys to see what type of sound was used. Later on noticing the pattern of low-orchestral sound in the background when there was no major action and low upbeat sound when there was; I began to search for the new sound that could be potential sound used in our film. After the second set of sound we realised that it was the important and difficult part because even though you may get sound that you think sounds good. Does not mean it would fit the action. Coming realisation from this we decided to leave the parts that were difficult to find music to match and screen our un-finished to a small audience asking them what believed would suit the particular scene. “Low-funky music” was suggested by one person in the audience and everyone else agreed. Taking into account what was said I went off again, looking for some music of this sort and found a couple which I felt was likely to merge with the rest of the music that we already had. Knowing that having too much music could sound really messy and my aim was to bridge the clips together with the music; I want sound that I could not use for one scene. Final when we had put all the music together and were happy with it, we screen it to year 9 class and question them on it. One member of class claimed that “The music was excellent... as it really fit the film!”

After completing our film and both Ancillary tasks we showed our film to the rest of the students in our class and they gave us positive feedback on our film, they thought it was very funny/ interesting and the use of effects added realism to the scene. Overall without the feedback we receive from our audience we would not have been able to make our film as successful as we did because it was from their opinions of what they wanted that we made the changes from, to make our better.