Question 3 - Ettie's Evaluation

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Firstly our target audience can be found on this post: click here Therefore when looking into audience feedback, we therefore looked into asking people within our target audience.

One of the first pieces of audience feedback that we did was to ask people on survey monkey on what they thought of our synopsis, character, title and location. Here is the blog post about it (click here). We felt it was vital that these decisions suited our target audience so after getting good feedback we knew we would be able to continue the planning stage for the film. If anyone had given negative comments about the synopsis we would have acted on them to make sure the film would suit its' audience.

The texting section that we asked feedback on

Throughout our editing process we would sometimes edit whilst our peers would be with us, this allowed us to ask them about how our film looked. Examples of this was when Rosie asked her friend Josh about the texting scene at the start of the film. She asked him about the font, colour and position. We also discussed this within our group and people in our media class so we could attain something that was easy to read, and was obvious that it was a text. Another occasion was when I asked my twin about how our poster looked as she gave me feedback which I acted upon. Click here for the blog post about it. By having this audience feedback we were able to adjust our products to suit the audiences needs and desires.

The audience feedback I gathered about my first poster draft

The poster draft that I asked audience feedback on

Our final poster after audience feedback

Rosie and I then asked our friends on Facebook about our final poster and these are two of the replies we got:

Reply 1

Reply 2

As the people we asked were in our target audience, it shows that our poster would be successful for them. We did however ask them for any improvements but we haven't received any yet.

We also planned to ask final audience feedback on the whole of our film, hence why we posted it before the Christmas break. But unfortunately something went wrong when we uploaded the video to YouTube and the video could not be seen. This means that we will now have to quickly sort this out when we go back to college (as the files are only available at college) and send out the audience questionnaires the same day. We will then gather the feedback and make any quick alterations to our short film before the deadline. It is unfortunate that we could do the surveys now, but I feel that we will still be finished in time if we work quickly. It is important that we gather audience feedback on this as then our film will be at its most successful.

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UPDATE:

Since returning from the Christmas holidays we have been able to fix our short film and post it on youtube. This meant that we were able to send out our survey for people to anaylse all parts of our work. We chose to use survey monkey as it was free, easy to create, and easy to send to people to fill in. The only downside to it was that we were limited to only 10 questions before we need to start paying for the websites functions. However this was not much of a problem as I just chose more important questions to ask.  Here are the questions and responses (click images to enlarge):

As you can tell, we did not get a huge response rate from our survey even though we sent it to multiple people. This is the downside of using surveys to collect data as they usually have a low response rate. However from the responses that were collected, we were able to tell the audiences understanding and whether we needed to improve any areas. From looking at the responses we can tell:

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FILM

• Our audience understand that the black and white editing at the end represents a flashback
• We need to make the second texting screen longer so the text can be read: "At the end when it shows the texts, make it longer as it dissapears before I finished reading it."
• The audience know that the woman is having an affair throughout: "Yes, when she gets a text saying dylan cant wait to see her, her conversation at the bar, and the hesitation about going on holiday."
• The title 'Drop' suited the film well as one respondent answers: "Yes as it shows the love between the two have decreased and so the name gives a nice link to this and the imagery of the pill droping in the glass is an effective link."

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE POSTER

• The audience thought the poster worked well: "I like how the colours work well and how the work drop looks like its falling."
• The audience though that it mirrored the film: "Yes as the female is looking away so suggests an affair"

 QUESTIONS ABOUT THE LWL REVIEW

• The audience thought the review looked professional and alike the original LWL material: Yes looks professional and has lots of depth and detail 
• The audience thought the review didn't give too much of the plot away: "i think it does because it hints what happens without actually giving away the end."

Overall I feel that our audience understood our film well and that our ancillary tasks were effective, we will now make changes to any improvements needed. 

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After getting the audience feedback we then decided to immediately act on it, here is a video where we address the problem that the text could not be read. This video shows the new length of the text which is hopefuly long enough to read!

We also got a survey reply saying that the restaurant scene was too bland:

Therefore we responded to this by adding a non-diegetic royalty free soundtrack to the scene and also addded some ambient noise (we did this by recording people then inserting this into the film at a low level). We feel this helped to add more atmosphere like the respondent requested.

click here to watch the section: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3RlrVSiIr4&t=2m39s 

Also, here is a timelapse that I made of me and Rosie fixing the sound on our short film:

By having an external view it allowed us to pick up these errors. This therefore highlights how important audience feedback is!