Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is the key to producing a successful and credible media product. As the audience is what brings in revenue, without making sure your product is going to fully satisfy your audience, you will be taking a huge risk. In addition to that, asking selected audiences to view your product before it is officially released, can spark an interest in your work, making it popular and word may spread. Amongst other goals for your media product, the main one is always going to be to please your audience, and without audience feedback, you will not know whether you have achieved this and met the audience's needs. Audience feedback can also be useful as it can make you aware of adjustments and improvements that need to be made before distributing it to the public, as well as things that they enjoyed and worked well.  

An example of this can be seen with the film “The Dark Knight Rises”. After a small selected audience had previewed the film, a number of the members of the audience complained about not being able to understand what Bane, the main villain, was saying due to the mask over his mouth. Erik Davis commented on twitter: “A fantastic action sequence hurt by the fact you cannot understand the villain at all.” Warner Brothers took this criticism on board, however, Christopher Nolan refused to completely rework the audio, and only adjusted the sound slightly. If the film had been released without receiving audience feedback, they may have distributed a media product that would not meet its goal as a film; to tell a story.    

 A further example of how audience feedback is greatly important when creating media products is in the film “Thelma and Louise”. After the first run of previews, many members of the audience commented on how they disliked the ending to film, with the two main characters driving off a cliff, and then on the way down crashing multiple times into various obstacles to their death. The audience disliked the way they had been on this journey with these two women, and then they died of such a graphic and brutal death. The filmmakers responded to this audience feedback by cutting the film just as the back tires leave the edge of the cliff. Although it still implies that the two characters die, it does not show the full sequence of their death, which pleased audiences, and allowed them to consider if their "journey" had really ended.

For all three of our media products I used a variety of ways to retain audience feedback.   First of all, I uploaded the short film onto youtube.

I consequently posted the link onto social networking sites such as: 

Twitter

Facebook

And Tumblr.

I asked friends of the intended target audience to give a general evaluation of the film. 

Additionally, I held a screening of the short film to a few friends of the selected target audience for the film .After they had watched it, I filmed their views of the film. I was able to collect a lot of feedback for the short film.

 

Overall, the main criticism of the film was that not enough tension had been built up by the ending of the film. Many suggest a more dramatic score, but one twitter user suggested to add a heartbeat towards the end of the film, and then when the main character dies, the heartbeat will suddenly stopped. 

As a group, we really like that idea and decided to use it as it would make the sad, tragic ending much clearer. 

One twitter user recommended to add a nursery rhyme score to our short film. 

We decided against this idea as we were going down the route of a fairytale theme, rather than a nursery rhyme. Although both fairy tales and nursery rhymes are closely linked, we didn’t want our short film to get even more complicated or to confuse the audience. We also felt that a nursery rhyme score would not have been appropriate considering our target audience is teens, we feel they might have taken our educational short film less seriously if we had added that.   

Another Twitter user pointed out that not enough time was given to read the beginning quote. 

In response to this comment, we lengthened the time the first quote ran for. It was a really small and easy adjustment to make, however it made a massive difference to our film. 

It would have been confusing for the audience if they were unable to read the beginning quote as they may not have gotten the right mood and feel for the film.

For our poster and magazine article, in order to receive audience feedback we again posted it on social networking sites such as Twitter.

I asked my friends and followers to comment on what they thought worked well, and if they felt anything needed changing. Whilst at the screening for the short film, we also showed our audience the poster and article, and just like we did for the short film, we recorded their views. 

We were pleased to hear that some had noticed the poster took on a thriller look to it, as this was the look we were going for. 

The audience feedback from the article was overall mainly positive.

However they said it seemed like a very serious piece of text, and maybe to make it more colloquial and relevant to target audience. 

We listened to this feedback and made suitable amendments, however, we did believe some of the technical termonolgy should remain in the review if we wanted to be taken seriously by some higher level media students. Some readers also commented on some of the grammar, we took that criticism on board and fixed all the spelling and grammar.

In addition to this audience feedback, I also constructed a questionnaire for the article and poster. I used non technical terminology so the questions I asked were understandable. I also made sure that the questionnaire was not too long as I planned to hand them out during break and lunch time along with copies of the poster and article. I got a lot of feedback from this, mainly positive.

Again, it was clear that our audiences were picking up on the thriller aspect of our poster, which most said they thought was a good way of getting a wider audience, as they would never have guessed it was an educational film from the poster. Similar to the previous feedback for the article, most people just commented on the grammatical errors, but apart from that said after reading the article, they would go and see the short film.