What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The main thing I have learnt is that the audience is always right. From the very start of this media project that audience has helped the film progress so much. it’s important to get audience feedback as they are the ones watching the film and that constructive criticism changes the way they in which the audience views the film. From the planning stages of our I am glad we started receiving feedback from the audience. It all started with the pitch, our initial pitch was of a story of a serial killer who was now on his death bed and wanted to confess his sins, through our pitch feedback we were convinced that the story had many faults which we did not see, thankfully we were able to see this and the audience feedback lead to a huge meeting on whether our initial idea was causable, eventually we changed our idea to what is now Monster. After our first draft of our storyboard we showed it to our class for some audience feedback and we learnt that our film was to continuous with in the same shots we was then introduced to cut away shots we realised that by using simple cut away shots that the audience was more secure as they were able to see what all the characters were doing with in the scene, one prime example of this with in our film is the cut away shots of the girls walking to classroom and the shots of the class room. In addition from feedback we were told we needed to use more cinematography with in film, we learnt that cinematography makes the films more interesting for the audience. From this we added more shots using cinematography such as when Lilly and her friends are laying in the grass and a shot is taken from above. We realised that by doing a few more shots like this the story was more moving and this really heightened the friendship with Zoe and Emily but also highlighted her isolation with in the plot. The next thing we received feedback on was our editing, firstly we had to create an assembly edit in of our whole five minute long film. After creating an assembly edit we had to show students in our class and our teacher on whether they thought the film worked well together. As the assembly edit was a rough edit of what shots we would be using this was vital as we were able to see whether the audience liked the type of shots we were using and whether many seemed to long, from this we realised whether the shots used evoked the emotions we wanted them to convey. From this feedback we changed several lengths of shots simply because they were too long or short and they did not convey to the meaning that was originally intended. Furthermore we took out shots that seemed irrelevant such as a handheld camera shot that starts in front of the character and was panned into an over the shoulder shot because from our audience feedback we were told the shot did not have the same pace as the other shots used with in our sequence and were told the shot looked uneasy and irrelevant. After our assembly edit we continued with editing our scenes and after each one completed we decided to gather feedback, this would be easier than gathering feedback at the end of the finished film because they would be easier to correct here, from doing so we were able to correct or change any shots that did not fit in with our film. For our ancillary tasks feedback was essential especially when creating our film poster as the audience would be the ones seeing the poster which will entice them to watch the film, if this is not doing so the audience can tell us and we can make changes to the poster. Our first poster was a fist punching through paper from feedback we realised that the poster looked more like a book cover or from a fighting film, from this we realised that we need to re-evaluate the themes in our film and colour that connate the message with in our film, so feedback helped us improve the massively. Another task that was vital to receive feedback on was our title sequences when doing this we decided to receive two types of feedback, one type was before on any ideas for our title sequence and the other was after in which received feedback on how the title credits worked well with the film from this we could change them before the final deadline of the film. After the title credits we received feedback about our magazine review, this was important as we realised whether the magazine review fits in with total film magazine and found out what needed to be changed to make it fit in with the total film style.