Evaluation Q.3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The value of receiving productive feedback at various stages of film making is fundamental in constructing a film which meets the demands of your audience, and subsequently makes it a successful film. As we worked in a group it was important to make sure that anytime we were receiving feedback we was writing it down, so we didn’t forget it, and miss out on the audiences needs.

We first started to construct our piece by coming up with different themes such as manhood, teenage heartache, war, crime, and so fourth. We began to break down what would work and wouldn’t as a group. As time passed by we chose manhood and war as our themes. We then formed a story idea were a weak male joins the army to gain his manhood at this point we really liked the idea, but as we pitched it to the audience they began to ask “how are we going to portray war”? And “will this be practical and realistic”? After this crucial information we thought twice about the idea. The importance of this feedback was imminent because we may of went into the final stages of production and realised we could not create a successful film due to practical reasons. We then changed the story and made him gain his manhood through saving his mothers life which was much more practical. From this as a group we learnt that we have know real budget limited resources and time and we need to be realistic even though we all wanted to make Hollywood quality films.

To my left is the second treatment for our film and was the part which had most feedback and measures for improvement. The audience really liked our treatment calling it original, and creative although one person said “steer away from bullying” which was course for concern for us, because we didn’t want to create a bland basic film on bullying. We took this on board and changed a few sections of the second scene to reduce the bullying element and bring out the favouritism from the mother towards Colin.  We then reconstructed the treatment and changed the age of the characters to 16 and 18 so we could base some of the narrative in a school this meant finding a location was more practical and accessible when it came down to filming. So are treatment was much shorter precise and practical due to the feedback we had received which I feel made our film better.

A storyboard is very important in any film because it maps out the project and will save a lot of time whilst shooting, so I felt it important that it received a lot of constructive criticisms and tweaking to make it really efficient and effective. Our first story board was unprofessional and didn’t flow well from shot to shot and lacked continuity, so as a group we changed it to make it a freer flowing we did this by adding mid shots, and long shots between different scenes to add continuity. Even the presentation of our storyboard was under par so we had to improve this so we could get our message across to our actors and our audience. Eventually when we started filming it was more convenient for us the crew, to get our actors to do what we envisioned to make our film a success. As a film maker I have learnt the importance of making a storyboard.

                           

 As our task brief was to make a “minimal dialogue” film when making the script we had various issues using this small amount of speech, and the layout of our script. The feedback that we had was that we should show the mothers illness much more, add a few more scenes to show the relationship of the brothers and we needed to show the favoritism between the mother and the elder brother Colin. We took this information on board and added another scene were Colin’s friends wait for him at the front door to show how popular Colin was. We made the mother look more poorly by adding tablets, and crouches within the shot. We thought these changes would make our piece stronger and show the large contrast between Colin the elder stronger brother and John the weaker younger brother. From this I learnt you have to portray what you see in your head and convert it into a finished article because your audience may not understand your vision even if you do.

As the shooting had taken place when then digitised the footage to begin editing our film, on a personal note I didn’t feel the shooting went as well as it could of so it was crucial we spent a lot of time editing, and then improving our film. As a group we spent a lot of time tweaking our film and critiquing it ourselves being very forthcoming with new ideas and various shot we could install into our piece to make it better. In the first viewing to our audience they all commented on our sound saying the voiceovers was not clear and that are sound levels kept ascending and descending randomly during the film is very unprofessional, they also said our shots need to flow better, we took this on board and went back into editing our film. But first of all we left our film for a while so we could come back with fresh minds and look at our work from a different perspective; I feel that this was a great way for us to improve our film from a professional point of view. The changes we made like fading in our sound, and cutting shots down and cleaning it up really has made a positive effect on our work this was evident because in the final viewing we received a lot of positive feedback like “the tracking shot of John outside Upney walk-in centre was really effective” and “your rotation spinney shot around John was very good and the film is much better” and many others. Although they still gave us further improvements like we still need to work on improving the sound levels, and the amount of titles we had. These things were addressed but we couldn’t add more dialogue which was another hindrance as members of the audience wanted more dialogue to help tell the narrative. This was because when shooting ‘Take the next step’ I was telling the actors what to do whilst they were acting, because I thought we wouldn’t need the audio. As an amateur film maker I will endeavour to make sure I catch all the dialogue even if it was meant to a silent film because it may be needed and could be used as a back up plan. We also had to change apart of our music within the film because it didn’t match the emotion and genre of our piece and made it sound silly and unprofessional so people said, to combat we instead found some more copy right free music with the same genre of rap, this sounded better and had suitable lyrics which complemented our film in comparison to the lyrics of the first artist which was “Fly like a butterfly sting like a bee” and sounded like a joke. This has taught me that you can also make improvements even if it means changing the music or a few shots as long as you have a purpose for doing it. We also had to work on reducing the length of our film by using one shot to show something instead of 4, this limited the vary of shots although it reduced time, and made the shots flow better. This became a problem as one of the members of my audience said it was too long. The shots we took out mostly were the ones near the beginning of the narrative as John was walking into school; these shots consisted of a low angle tracking sot, a point of view shot and a close-up. The editing process went well and made our film what it is, in my opinion all this feedback we took and implemented into our work was very crucial and important because the audience know what they want, and we needed to provide this in a stunning way and I feel we did this due to there reaction.

Like any financially successful film marketing is a key part of its plan, we marketed our film by making 3 film posters and one for a billboard; this was all part of one campaign. It was important that during the creation of it we got feedback so we could make changes which would make it appeal to my audience more and get us more viewers. They said my first was a great success and was the most popular one and some people went as far to say “it looked like it was done by a professional marketing company” which was a massive compliment to my work. The second poster was a billboard which I had less to time to create, the audience was much more critical saying it was not as good as the first one, and “the font is different in comparison to the others, you should change it”. This feedback made sense as all the posters are part the same campaign so I changed it and tidied it to make it as professional as the first one. This is an image of the improved version.

This has taught me to be more cautious when making posters, and look out for mistakes which could have been avoid, these lesson has improved me creatively.  The third poster which was most different in contrast to the first also received criticism saying it looked “cheap” which spurred me on to make improvements which was changed the colour of the titles, to make it match up with the others and maintaining the same colour of the cast names. In addition to this some house hold improvements to bring the quality to a similar level of the first two posters. I have really enjoyed making these posters and improving them through feedback. All in all even though feedback is sometimes hurtful as you become emotionally attached to your work which have been doing for so long. Although it is very important to get this feedback to make your piece better, and also I have learnt as a film maker that you make a film for an audience and if you don’t carter to your audience your film can not be successful to anyone but yourself. This whole experience of making a film has shown me how much hard work it takes to make a quality piece of work and how important feedback is. This something I will take with me through all walks of life to make me not only a better film maker but a better person and I feel this is very important.