Audience Feedback and Corrections

Audience Feedback and Corrections

What went well
Our establishing long shot of the blue doors and the flickering light was, as a group, our favourite shot and also one that the audience applauded. The contrast of the colours was applauded as the colour grading was used to effect.

There was also praise about the sound of the clip, we used mainly diegetic sound as in social realism films there is no score so that the film Is more realistic or relatable, we conformed to this convention and the effect is what we were hoping for as there was no false sympathy added to the scene through a score that would have made the opening feel almost fake and too emotional. It also made it seem like the only diegetic dialogue that is distinguishable was more prominent.

The audience enjoyed the transitions we used for the font and for the fade in at the beginning, this also applied to the black screen when the title became visible. We found that these were suitable for the genre we had chosen and were effective in that they were subtle yet still held presence.

Our lighting was not criticised an was all natural, another common feature for social realism films. Our time lapse was also a feature that the audience enjoyed, the use of a different medium to show time passing was effective in its own way as it showed that we had different techniques in our final product.

The locations were something that we were commended about several times, the use of Brixton, London and Maidstone were effective as it meant that we had a range of busy but different places to choose from, their effectiveness was amplified by the character we used and the situations that were posed.

Corrections
One of the corrections that was suggested to us by our audience was that we slowed down the subway scene that we had previously sped up. This was suggested as when you watch the clip the movement of the pedestrians on the platform look awkward and obviously sped up, as we had seen the scene over and over it did not stand out to us so the audience helped us correct the unseen issues with our work. To edit this piece of our film opening we used the want tool and chose the ‘normal 100%’ option that came down for the drop down list.

After applying this to the footage we were able to edit the clip so that it was back to a regular speed. By doing this we also made our film opening a more appropriate length.

Another point of improvement was the titles, whilst some of the audience praised our choice of font we also had criticism, as we had worked for a while over finding the font we decided to keep it as the mixed reviews were unhelpful to what we would change it too.

Another point was that the titles were too small so we had to enlarge them so that they were the correct size for the screen, this also made them readable, we also had to have titles for the titles so that instead of just names showing we would need ‘Executive producer’ etc. Others said that the titles could be more prominent, this was hard to do as we did not want the colour of the font to vary with different scenes so we just kept to the white text and moved it to a more visible place on our screen.

A major issue that we found with our whole film opening was that the costume seemed too new in some shots. This was not something that we could alter in our footage so we have to look at the possible alternatives that we could have chosen so that in the future we will not make the same mistakes in the costume departments.

As some of the audience was not familiar with the genre and common conventions of the social realism they did not understand the plot of the film opening. This is due to the fat that the genre relies on a character driven film and plotline comes after character development, this also leads to the fact that our opening may seem repetitive. As we wished to capture the life of a homeless person the shots we got did not heavily feature too much variation as there is few things a homeless person can do. To try and edit this we did look at the order of our shots and consider rearrange meant so that similar shots were not too close together.

There was an issue that our production company was not clear as it had been taken from a YouTube version so the quality had been highly degraded. As this issue was evident to us as well we got the original file and put that in the final product instead of the ripped version that caused the complaint.
When we were gathering our audience feedback we noticed that the sound effects that we had added were too quiet to be heard when the clips are played aloud, this gave the thought that the sound was flat instead of layered and dimensional like the final product was when you listened through headphones. Due to this issue, we made the effects louder and kept the main traffic noises the same so that we could hear over them.

Our final improvement was the ending. We were given advice that the ending could be improved so that the film opening started on Emma and then ended on Emma. Although we wished to edit this into our final film opening we were unable as the time frame for the corrections was too small and the location was in Brixton and we didn’t have the funds to go there to just film a reaction or close up that would canonically fit into the scene.