Evaluation part 3 - Adam RUTHERFORD

What have you learnt from your audience feedback                             

Three Words’ has an audience demographic consisting of teenagers of both sex, aged between 16 and 24. Because of this we realized that we could utilize social networking sites, particularly Facebook, as a portal to reaching our target audience.

Facebook is now the most popular social networking site in the world with over 400million active users worldwide. We consider Facebook to be the perfect place to receive audience feedback (particularly in our demographic), and a perfect place to interact with people, and get their honest opinions on our product.

We created a Facebook group and invited as many people as we could, asking for feedback on our short film, poster and details such as the title of our film. I really enjoyed interacting with the audience in this way because not only did it give us an outside opinion on where we were going right and wrong, but also helped us make the film better, and more suited to our audience.

The film “Snakes On A Plane” was a huge internet phenomenon before being released, forming large fan bases online and becoming the subject of many forums and discussions across the internet. Despite “Snakes…” not being a British film or social realism, I took inspiration from the way the film was promoted and discussed over the internet, particularly the way New Line Cinema (the studio that released the film) incorporated feedback from online users into its production, and added five days of reshooting. We were not in a position to reshoot once we had the feedback, but the premise of the idea inspired me all the same.

Generally we found that our audience feedback was very positive. We did receive comments on things we could improve on, which I am very grateful we did receive. One of the benefits of using Facebook is that because we weren’t asking people to give us feedback face-to-face, we were able to get a more honest opinion what people really thought. This also made the positive comments more gratifying, and writing this evaluation easier.

The following is the a summary of the comments we received for particular aspects of filming, with each section followed by my conclusion of what I learnt from the feedback.

Editing

• 'I like the parallels between the character's views...Also, I like the way it skips so quickly at the end from one to the other and is brought together abruptly at the end as it leaves more for the imagination.'
• 'The repeated pattern thing but with different views was great'
• '...and the alternate views are good and original too not like the typical thing that usually gets done'

People seemed to really like the idea of showing the same story from two different opinions, as it was 'original' and different. One thing we heard which wasn't posted on our Facebook page was that the end of the film could have been edited with more pace to give the ending more tension; a comment we have taken on board. Some people have also said that they enjoyed the ending and how the camera flipped from one character to the other, showing how different their thoughts and interpretations were.

Camera Work

• 'The framing is very good.'
• 'Use of hand-held camera was a good touch, making it seem more like a point of view shot.'
• 'The close-ups of him eating were disgusting which worked well!'
• 'I really like the ‘She’s gorgeous’ close up, which makes really good use of shadow and natural lighting to create a very realist yet beautiful image.'

We were glad people thought that the camera work in the film was effective, as we spent a lot of time on the storyboard and at the locations working out what frames would be the best to convey the characters personalities and tell the story. Most importantly in my opinion our uses of hand held camera and natural lighting were picked up, and even praised, meaning that we managed to create and keep to social realism conventions successfully.

Sound

• 'The soundtrack goes really nicely. I particularly like the end scene with the well placed parts of telly on in the background.'
• 'Use of non diegetic sound is very good!'
• '...loved the music in the background too. The only thing i would say is sometimes the sound seemed to cut out.'
• '...one criticism could be that the sound should be polished a bit more as the sound cut out every now and then.'
• 'The internal monologues work nicely ...the soundtrack is lovely and compliments the tone of the film overall.'
• 'The only thing is you can kinda hear where you are starting and stopping the voice recorder.'
• 'The use of Gavin and Stacey in the background of the final scene was also a really nice touch as a contrast to the painfully awkward situation and as a popular culture reference point which many films and TV shows try to shy away from.'
• '...and there wasn't any of that annoying background buzzing noise that ALWAYS happens on media work!'

The feedback we received for sound was once again generally positive however it was also the one convention we received criticism on. Throughout the film we use voiceovers to tell the story. Unfortunately at the end of the film we had great difficulty getting the recordings to match the scenes, as we hadn’t allowed enough footage for the voiceovers. For this reason the sound at the end comes across as quite sloppy and amateur, which is a real shame considering the rest of the film. This had been pointed out in the feedback, and has helped us realized not to make the same mistakes in the future. Apart from this we were very pleased with some of the feedback, especially the choice of having Gavin and Stacey playing on the T.V. in the last scene. We were worried that this would confuse the audience as they might think it a voiceover, but fortunately this wasn’t the case. Carl Williams’ brilliant piece that plays at the beginning and end of the feature went down very well, and conveyed the feeling we were trying to give to the audience.

Mise En Scene

• 'The interior cinematography was somewhat more professional than the exterior although time lapse might have been quite effective on shots such as the boyfriend eating the pizza.'
• 'I really like the ‘She’s gorgeous’ close up, which makes really good use of shadow and natural lighting to create a very realist yet beautiful image.'
• 'I liked the use of props, with beer cans and messy room and stuff for him, helped to show their characters.'
• 'The locations were typical teenage places and her room was more girly which made it more realistic.'
• 'Use of natural lighting and shadow inside looked nice.'

From this I can see that as a group we really have done well at keeping to the conventions of social realism. One of my roles within our team was Lighting, so it is a relief to see that people have responded positively to the aspects of this I had to take into consideration. The Mise En Scene was always going to be a difficult convention to deal with as we had to keep INSERT LONG MEDIA LIKE WORD. We needed to make sure that the objects and props we had fitted in with the social realism genre.

Narrative Structure

• 'I'd already read your screenplay so the concept wasn't a surprise, but realised it worked even better than I had anticipated, I thought it was the perfect form for a student film. You guys didn't attempt anything over-ambitious, it was a charming snippet of teenage innocence with some kinda profound undertones. I liked the end, in that you didn’t milk the sadness, it stayed light-hearted in a way.' '...love the story line and their different views on what they both think.'
• 'so nicely written'
• 'internal monologues work nicely and it makes sense.'
• 'The concept of two people being at completely crossed emotional purposes was really interesting. It presents a classic dilemma whilst never showing any confrontation allowing the viewer to decide for themselves what action the protagonists take and heightening the inevitable pain of the situation.'
• 'Got straight to the point but an in interesting way as neither of them actually spoke and it was all thoughts and they went really well with their facial expressions.'

From reading this I can see that people have managed to grasp the concept of our film pretty well. We were worried that we might have made the story a little sparse, especially at the end, however as shown above, our target audience have an almost perfect interpretation of what we were trying to achieve.

Poster

• 'Text as well as the stars can be hard to see, the tag line should maybe be more prominent as that's the only chance you have to hook an audience.'
• 'The credits at the bottom cross over into other lines, "di-rected" that wouldn't be seen on a poster. Like the colour use but the red is a little much, I find, contrasts too much with the black logos at the bottom, maybe as a tag line etc. but I think the credits should be standard black.'
• 'I really like the colour concept (although i don't get the coloured bricks' meaning). I think the title looks great as well. I agree that the tag line should be more prominent, but I can't help but feel like a little more time spent on it and you could have something more slightly instantly gratifying. It’s a great idea for a tag-line and I don’t claim I can suggest anything better but I reckon you guys could. It also slightly detracts from the importance of the pairs of three words IN the film, as the poster kinda gets there too early and reduces their impact at the climax. But it’s pretty good anyway, I’m just being picky.'
• 'I think it looks good overall but I thought from seeing this that Tom was going to die (/had already) in the film, so I guess it's a bit misleading. It was a good idea though.'

 A lot of people seemed to have trouble understanding the red bricks in our poster and they're meaning. This is unsurprising as they didn't really have much important meaning. From studying other British film posters we really like the idea of dull background with sporadic bright colours. A perfect example of this is 'Sommers Town' which Dominic has analysed elsewhere on this blog. We used red as it's the colour most associated with love, however because of our choice to do this we have caused people to over analyse it. Someone even mentioned "I thought from seeing this that Tom was going to die" which proves this. I have learnt from this not to feel the need to add more then is necessary to a poster, and keep it simple unless we have a clear and concise idea of what were trying to achieve with it.

Review

Unfortunately we could not post our review on facebook as  the image kept coming up to pixilated, and the writing was to small to read (as can be seen to the right). Luckily Kiera went out and got some spoken word feedback from people and wrote it up for us.

 

• 'The image isn't very good quality, but it would work if it wasn't a screen grab from the film. It gets your attention.' 
• 'They look really similar, especially the actual text of the review, they look the same. What you've written is good too, it sounds like a proper review, but you've only said good stuff - you haven't been critical like a real review would be.'
• 'It's really similar, except those edges [referring to the text box with the title in it] should be round. I like the little Alice In Wonderland images though, they make it more interesting.'
• 'The format looks exactly the same, and the text sounds similar to the style of writing in the real review. You've even got the little numbers at the bottom and the page numbers.'

The feedback we received for our review was generally positive, however there were a few criticisms that I definitely agree with. If I was to do this review again I would remember to not only mention the positive aspects of the film, but also mention the negatives, like other reviews do. From reading all the feedback we have received from other people I think I'd find it much easier to write this review, as we have now had other people watch the film and give us feedback. It's difficult reviewing your own film as youv'e watched it so many times you start to miss things. Comments about the image not being good quality are justified however we found it difficult to make it as big as we did without it pixilating.