Audience Feedback

Audience feedback

Having finished editing our film opening we showed our product to a group of people with a mix of genders and an age range of 16-18 years. They gave us lots of very helpful feedback some of which we acted on and some of which we couldn’t because we do not have enough time so it would be impossible.

What was good/effective?

The audience for our coursework said many positive things about our film opening. They like the first shot where we started out of focus and then brought the shot of me lying on the floor into focus. They also liked the shot of me (as I was the actress) sat in front of the blue door with the flickering light in the corner, this was the most common compliment about our piece. Some of the groups said they liked the time-lapse of the traffic in Brixton. One of the groups said they liked the fact it had no non-diegetic sound, it was all diegetic sounds of traffic. Another positive thing was our locations including the blue door, the park and the Brixton location that we used. Some of our audience members also liked the colouring of the shots, we achieved this by using the colour grading on final cut to achieve the look that we wanted. A couple of groups said they liked the way we had edited the closing of the locket to a black screen as they thought it was effective.

What could be improved?

A couple of people thought the costume and mise-en-scene looked too clean and new so it wasn’t appropriate for the character in our film opening, unfortunately we do not have time to completely re-film everything so there is nothing we can do to address this feedback, additionally someone said the costume clearly presented the girl as a homeless person so we did not feel it needed changing. Similarly someone said they could not see a clear plot but once again it is too late for us to change this. One group mentioned the shot where our character is sat in the underground and the train goes past as we had sped this shot up which meant the man that walks past looks rather strange, to fix this we are going to set the speed back to normal. One of the pieces of feedback was that after the final shot there should have been a close up reaction shot of me so the film opening would have started with me and ended with me. Some of the groups could not work out if it was a film opening or opening credits this is because we subvert conventions of a film opening by using a montage rather than a short scene however we did intend it to be a film opening, however there is very little we can do to make the fact it’s a film opening clearer. One group said the production company was unclear, to fix this we looked at bringing in the original file or changing the footage we had by making it brighter and bigger so it is easier to read. There were a few comments about the sound as some people said they would have liked some non-diegetic sound (music), however we received lots of positive feedback about our use of only diegetic sound and so we decided not to change this. Another improvement regarding sound was that we could have had more background noise, so Natasha (who put this sound in originally) went back in and either made the sound louder or added more non-diegetic sounds. Additionally, Natasha also looked at the volume of the only diegetic dialogue we have, “scum”, because one group said they couldn’t hear it very well. The most common feedback was regarding the titles because they were just the people’s names so it was suggested that we put some of the roles people played in so I changed the credits to say:

·         Starring Emma Fuller

·         Director Caitlin Willis

·         Cinematography Natasha Russell

·         Executive producer Angel Chemjong Limbu

The groups of names were casting, costume and sound teams. I did this by selecting a title and going into the box on the right side of the screen to change what it said.

 

I then aligned it so it was either to the left or the right depending on what side the text was on as it did not look right being centre aligned.

Another piece of feedback regarding titles was that they moved too fast so people did not have enough time to read them. I made the titles longer by clicking on the end of the purple bar that represented text and dragging it out so the title lasted almost twice as long in some cases.