Evaluation: Question 3

What did you learn from audience feedback?

Throughout the process of our creative outcome, we relied heavily on feedback from our target audience to help meet a certain standard.
Feedback first caused us to change our initial idea. The iCan Contextual film was to be expanded and re-written, however the film was not meeting the requirements of the course, so we revised our entire strategy.

We were orginally going to make a commical TV advert for a fictional product based on the iPhone. For this we carefully emulated that of an existing iPhone advert. Due to audience feedback (comments on the video on Facebook and Twitter) we determined that our target audience would prefer a romantic-Comedy and started to work on Happily Ever After. In conclusion, our product was shaped and constructed by what we learnt from our audience feedback.

Our target audience is teenagers of age 13-18, both male and female. To meet this target audience, we looked into comedy films also targeted at our age group; such as "Vicky and Sam". In June we created a rough draft, the feedback we had received told us that the film lacked interesting shots and the comedy was much too generic.

Teacher feedback:

Here I received feedback directly from my teacher, this gave me direct knowledge on what improvements needed to be made from someone with knowledge of the course requirements and knowledge on blockbuster forms and conventions. The feedback from my teacher consisted of strengths, weaknesses and changed to be made. However we also needed feedback from our target audience.

After feedback on shot issues in our film, we decided to ever so slightly revise the script and re-shoot the entire film. Our original Happily Ever After used little music and was using obvious slapstick humour, however our new, final version of Happily Ever After uses more subtle humour and the shots are much more stylised and the video quality is stronger.

The image to the left displays the difference between setting in our two films, the original film (top) and the re-shoot (bottom). As you can see the area is more wedding like and has more on set.






Once this new version had finished its first draft, we decided to take a new approach to receiving feedback; social networking. We posted the video on Facebook to hear back from our target audience:

This feedback told us that it was appealing to our target audience, however also people spotted some small issues in the film; such as the lack of people at the wedding. For this we attempted to create a shot of many people in the church, however the split screen made the shot look out of place and the cuts can be seen. For this reason, the split was not used.

Audience feedback has helped me tailor the film to the target audience's preferences, and it has become seemingly vital in the film making process. Throughout the process of creating our film, our target audience have spotted and informed us of mistakes and things that they may not find particularly appealing, this has helped create a stronger film that better appeals to our target audience.