What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Throughout the entire course of this project I have sought feedback from potential audience members, most of the time through the social networking sites Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube and Facebook but I also constantly asked my media teachers and classmates for their opinions too. I have felt this very important to do as audience feedback allowed us to receive peoples opinions, both good and bad, about our production. Receiving suggestions about improvements helped us to constantly better our product and receiving compliments let us know that the audience were liking what we were doing and that we were on the right track.
I used Twitter right from the start to share progress with my followers. I kept them updated about what we had done and shared photographs and available film footage with them. I also asked a variety of questions to my followers to gather feedback and answers to help us develop of film and ancillary products. The good thing about using the social networking site Twitter was that because audiences could choose to follow the account and film updates I knew I would be able to receive good sensible answers and suggestions from people who were genuinely interested and willing to help improve our film and products. For this reason I often referred to Twitter when needing advice or opinions.
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Above is a screen shot of one of the questions I asked my followers on Twitter and one of the responses I received.
I asked a number of questions on Twitter, the first one being what audiences thought of our potential Flight poster design, from reading all of the responses I learnt that they did like the initial design and layout however they thought that we could improve by adding in more key information about the film as at the moment it looked very bare and lacked important details, such as the film release date and who the actors were. I was quick to correct this issue as so many audience responses indicated that including key information would be a huge improvement to the poster. By receiving responses like these I can sort out problems which I would not have necessarily seen or thought about myself. Also using Twitter I asked audiences what they thought of our first Flight film draft, the majority of responses were positive and we especially received lots of praise on our narrative and bedroom sequence shots, audiences said that the shots were very effective, visually appealing and drew them into the story, this feedback let us know that the bedroom sequence was one of the films strongest scenes. As well as receiving complimentary tweets many of my followers also gave us things to improve on, on reviewing the feedback the main criticism received was that audiences thought the end sequence, using the stop motion technique, was shaky and could be improved on, perhaps by re-shooting or by getting rid of the stop motion completely. From this Twitter feedback we decided to get rid of the stop motion effect completely as we also felt that this was one of the weaknesses of our first draft, the stop motion effect looked out of place as the rest of our film was filmed normally, receiving the audience feedback confirmed to us that removing the stop motion effect was beneficial and would help to improve our film. Tumblr
I used Tumblr when conducting audience interviews to get opinions of what people expected from our social realist film and when asking for peoples opinions of our first draft. The main reason we used Tumblr for this part of research was that audiences could leave responses anonymously. I found that people were more likely to leave criticism if they could do it anonymously and this allowed us to find out what people really thought of our film.
The screen shot above shows the questions I posted on Tumblr regarding peoples expectations.
The first question I posted to my Tumblr blog was what expectations people had of our social realist film, from the responses received I found that many audience members had very stereotypical options of what they expected, for example, all of the responses expected that the locations within our film would be very urban and that our main character would be a rebellious teenager. I conducted this feedback as I felt it would help me to stick to social realism film conventions and help our film to live up to audiences expectations, which I feel our film did. Another reason I conducted this research was so that I could also challenge peoples ideology and surprise them, the majority of responses received expected our film ending to be not be ambiguous, for this reason we decided to leave our ending open to interpretation and allow audiences to make their own minds up about our character. The other question I asked my followers on Tumblr was for opinions on our first draft. I felt that the responses we received on Tumblr for this question were more critical than the ones I received on Twitter with many people strongly sharing their opinions on what they didn't like about our first draft, this was perhaps because of the anonymity Tumblr provides. Even though some of the responses we received on Tumblr were very cutting they gave us a good idea about what we needed to improve on and we did also receive many comments which complimented our narrative. The main criticism which came up, was the stop motion effect, as this had also been commented on within our Twitter feedback we definitely decided to rethink our approach to the films ending.
Youtube
We primarily used Youtube to upload our music and film footage to share onto our blogs and social networking sites but I found that we received a couple of comments on our videos from people who happened to stumble upon them. The responses received on Youtube where perhaps the most helpful to us as we hadn't asked for them, this meant that people gave us their honest opinions of our product as they didn't feel pressured to give us praise which is what I feel many of my Twitter followers felt compelled to do.
I learnt from Youtube feedback on our films first draft that the audience didn't like some of the shots used, as you can see from the comment above this particular user didn't like a few of the opening shots. After receiving this response I decided to re-think some of the shots I had chosen to use within our film, in the end I did decide to change the hallway shot to something more visually appealing which would develop our narrative and compliment our opening sequence. Thanks to this comment I also made our walking sequence slightly shorter as on reviewing our first draft myself I also felt that this sequence was too long and I found myself losing interest in our film.
Facebook was another social networking site which, as a group, we referred to for opinions all the way through the creation of Flight. Facebook was a good place to get feedback quickly and directly from our target audience as the majority of our Facebook friends are aged between 16 - 24, because of these reasons Facebook was the social networking site we referred to most often.
Teacher Feedback
As well as using social networking sites I also constantly asked for opinions from my Media teachers. Advantages of this type of feedback was that I could get opinions quickly on the spot if I needed feedback fast and I could also see their facial expressions and body language, this was an advantage which we could not get on social networking sites. We implemented many suggestions which our media teachers had, such as adding a flash back sequence to our final film as they thought that our film structure was slightly confusing for audiences and the theme of drug use was only suggested within the last few seconds of our film, because of this feedback we decided to add in a flashback sequence to our film which would add a future events to come and help develop our narrative. However we didn't implement all improvements put forward such as the suggestion of making our film ending unambiguous, Mr Cunningham felt that by changing our film ending it would help to finalize our film and not leave our audiences with any unanswered questions, however from our initial research we found that many audiences liked the idea of having an open film ending so that they could make up their own minds about the film and for this research we decided not to change our film ending.
Conclusion
In conclusion seeking audience feedback has been very beneficial to our product, the feedback I received has help us shape our product and improve many aspects of our ancillary texts. As you can specifically by the differences in our first draft (see here) and final product we have made many changes in the development of our final film thanks to audience feedback. I have listed a few of the changes below:
- Added a flashback scene which our media teachers thought necessary for the development of our narrative. The added flashback scene also helps audiences to understand what our protagonist is thinking about and hints at the future events which may happen.
- Changed the dance sequence as it was not as smooth and polished as we liked, our media teachers commented on the stability of our dance footage and together we decided to re-shoot this sequence.
- Excluded shots and scenes which a lot of audience members thought took away from the intensity of our product. Shots which got excluded include, Sophie walking to the dance studio, the slightly blurry duck scene and many nature clips within the walking sequence.
- Shortened the walking sequence as many audience members felt it went on for a bit too long and caused them to lose interest.
- Perhaps the biggest change to our production, the ending. We spent a long time trying to decide what to do with the ending of our film, many alternative endings were made and audience feedback, particularly on Facebook, was a big help when deciding what to do.
