Evaluation Part 3 - Dom

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

I gained the majority of my audience feedback via social networking sites such as Facebook. I did this because Facebook is a product used predominantly by members of our target audience that are the 16-24 year old age bracket and both male and female.Seeing as most people in this bracket will go on Facebook a few times a day to at least once a week I felt it was the perfect way to receive audience feedback. I made a Facebook group to start with asking people to comment on everything from the name of the film to the ancillary tasks, which is infact how we decided on the name for our film.(http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=449048835382&ref=ts) I also posted the video on my status asking people to comment on what they thought (see feedback post). 

General Feedback
Overall the feedback was very good people liked the shots we used and said the storyline was very retrospective of what modern day teenaged relationships are like. 

• "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."  Callum Mclean
• "love the story line and their different views on what they both think and using the handheld camera was good touch making it seem more like a point of view shot" Ben Brown 

Our main criticism of the piece was on the editing of the sound during the scene when it cuts from Kate in the bathroom to Tom on the sofa.

•  "The only thing is that you can kinda hear when u are starting and stopping the voice recorder with the voice overs." Ben Brown
• "loved the music in the background too. The only thing i would say is sometimes the sound seemed to cut out." Abi Walker
• "However one criticism could be that the sound should be polished a bit more as the sound cut out every now and then." Joe Merrion 

We spent ages on this section trying to make the voice-over fit with the footage but the problem was that the shots were to long and when we tried to shorten it got very confusing and looked messy. The main fault in the sound editing they commented on was when Kate says "love" which does cut off very abruptly. If I were to do this again I would either try to lengthen the speech or make the shots cut better together better so it was at a good pace to fit the speaking but also not to fast that the whole thing looks like a blur.

Storyline and Narrative

• “so nicely written” 
• “...love the story line and their different views on what they both think.”
• “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.”
• “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.."
• “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.”
• “internal monologues work nicely and it makes sense.” 

The Feedback above is encouraging to what the audience felt about our film and it is nice to see that the main concept of the film not to make a typical social realist love story has actually interested them and made them watch till the end. In the majority of feedback from people that i have had via word of mouth it seems they liked the binary opposition of the two characters feeling towards each other. We decided not to use Todorov's theory of narrative (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJXAMKrZPxAzpJeXBrNK8DCrB7qByw-N4uN9k9pG6_xmEMuXkLj6yyUbOVg31AYicfCQJofb4wV1jk9jO0lcKxUD7wy3mSnM0RqNPhAcTIdsiLEG4GQcydzEotoRdc4d3qM5mXXN6MbO3A/s1600-h/Todorovs+theory+of+narrative.jpg) and it seems to have been enjoyed by the audience as all of them found the narrative "interesting" and kept them interested, something crucial to a short film.   Ancillary Task - Review As for the ancillary tasks people really liked the layout of our review and said that the little pictures made it looks as though it was a proper Little White Lies page. Some people did mention how the photo on the review was a bit grain but this was simply because it was a screen grab and it couldn't be improved. The text boxes not being round was something that we completely over looked and in reflection we should have taken a bit more time on the fine details. The feedback below pointed out this problem and I feel if it was done again we would concentrate harder on the finer details.The text received good feedback which is good but didn't match the smaller reviews in the bottom right perfectly, this would also be revised if it were done again.

• "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."
• " I like this a lot, however the picture is a bit grainy. the layout is really good and the text brilliantly written, only criticisms on the text is that the whole review bigs up your film too much for the ratings it is given I feel."

Ancillary Task - 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 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 bla
• “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 tagline 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.”

The comments on the poster were good and the main feedback we got that was that some people thought Tom looked dead in the poster but after watching the film saw the significance of him being desaturated. The meaning of the bricks wasn't made clear as it doesn't really have a meaning in theory by people commenting on this it means that the aim to use the brick colours to draw the audience in and look at the poster has worked. The research I did into posters made me found a poster for the 2008 Shane Meadows film "Somers Town" which uses the random colour to attract an audience. (http://www.wildaboutmovies.com/images_7/SomersTown_poster_big.jpg). Also in my research I found that many film posters don't just use the standard black for the credits at the bottom of the poster. We did try to see what it looked like but it looked out of place with all the other text on the poster.