Evaluation: What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?

We knew that it was important to gain audience feedback in the very beginning of coming up with our first ideas for our film. This involved me and my other group member lorna coming up with our own idea for a period drama. So I created an animatic which I would gain audience feedback for and take on board. We both wanted to create a period drama and so both of us came up with our own concept/ plot for a film so that we could make a teaser trailer from it. Both our ideas were similar but different and we decided to stick with one idea because the other was too difficult to accomplish which we found out from audience feedback.
http://megansa2blog.blogspot.com/2009/12/anamatic.html - My animatic

After deciding the plot and genre of our teaser trailer we had to come up with a name. This we found hard because we wanted it to signify the genre of film and the time the film was set. For example the title Pride & Prejudice signifies 19^th century period drama because it is a famous novel by Jane Austen who wrote the novel in the late 18^th Century and had it published in the early 19^th Century. After researching 19^th Century sayings we found the saying “ For Aught I Know” we decided to get audience feedback on this and found that very few understood what it stood for and we found it confused the audience. We decided to change it to “For All I Know” because this is a more modern take on “For Aught I Know” but it still signifies the genre and the plot of the film which is the main female protagonist not knowing whether she will be with the man she loves, whether he is engaged to another and whether she can leave her family to be with him.

After getting some images for our teaser poster we added these to a presentation which showed our class the initial idea we had. We got positive feedback from the class about our initial idea and the picture of our main actress in character.

We then had a rough cut of our teaser trailer which we uploaded onto Facebook so that our friends and family could watch it and give us audience feedback. We uploaded it onto Facebook specifically because it had the write target audience for our film teaser trailer (12 +).

This is the feedback we got and how we addressed the negative feedback:

More anchorage to explain the plot of the film and the plot of the trailer

Our rough cut has no non diagetic music and no title cards which I think would signify that this is a teaser trailer and signify the plot of the trailer. Ideally we would have liked to have added more shots of the “love triangle” to create more drama and narrative enigma in the teaser trailer but we just didn’t have enough time.

Some shots are too dark

With trouble with shooting and our original actor backing out last minute we had very little time to shot the scenes with the main male protagonist. A few of these scenes were originally meant to be shot in the dark (the scene with the other woman and the main female protagonist running down the stairs and the main male protagonist running after her) but because we had little time and with it being winter we had to shot some scenes in the dark which we didn’t want to. Again due to the time schedule we didn’t have time to re shot these scenes and so had to make do with them. We considered starting to edit in final cut and see if we were able to lighten these shots but found we didn’t have time so we used the “wash in” transition on IMovie on the dark shots and used a “fade in” transition on the lighter shots.

Final Piece

Ideally we wanted to correct all these negative aspects of our teaser trailer but we found we just didn’t have time. We did however manage to add text which explains the plot more. We also added a voice over from the main female protagonist which is further anchorage that this is a teaser trailer. We would have also liked to have had a piano accompany the flute because the music is “Clair De Lune” which is traditionally a flute and piano accompaniment. We would have also liked to have re shot the scenes in the dark and sorted the colour change on the dress in the first shot but we just didn’t have time.