Evaluation question three

What have we learned from our audience feedback? 

Whilst creating our film we collected audience feedback on two occasions, first we made an editors cut and then when we had finished our film we got feedback on the final cut.

 

We created our editors cut and understood that the audience of our film may not have the same views as we have as they haven't been through all the production and therefore are less likely than we are to be biased towards the film. This made it necessary for us to do some audience feedback to see what we needed to do to improve our film. To do this we got ten people to view our film and then answer questionnaires designed to give us feedback that we could react to in order to improve our film.  In this sense the editors cut works like a prototype for our film, we created what we thought was the perfect finished film and then got feedback from our audience and acted on it to improve our film. One important result that we found was that 60% of the audience felt that they didn’t understand out film. This told us that we needed to make our film more understandable as 60% of our audience not being able to understand our film is likely to cause most of our audience to not enjoy it. This showed us that we needed to change an area of our film to make it more understandable and therefore we added a scene to our film.

We added a shot of our main character hitting the I button on his keyboard while stuttering "I, I, I" in the other scene that we were cross cutting with. This makes it more obvious that maybe the second scene is set in his head and also that maybe he has writers block. We felt that this gives a relieving feeling to the audience and helps them to understand the film.  

We also found that 40% of the audience felt the film was too long and the other 60% felt the film was about right, although the majority felt the film was about right we agreed with the 40% as we felt the film was too long and also felt that the other 60% would still feel the film was about right if it had been cut down a bit. We managed to cut the film down around 20 seconds with out actually removing anything from the film and just by sharpening up the editing. This ensures that the people who felt the film was about right will still feel it is about right as nothing has been removed but on the other hand the film wont appear to drag for the other 40%. By doing this we were able to please all of our audience. These were the two major aspects that we improved by creating an editors cut of the film. From this we were able to create our final cut. After we finished and were happy with our final cut we decided to get more audience feedback but didn’t plan on acting on this feedback unless we felt it was really necessary. Instead we decided this would just be used for quotes on our ancillary texts, and also for personal knowledge so we could know how to improve on our new film. This time most of the feedback was positive for example one viewer commented "well edited immersive plot" and another said "very clever storyline, when you get your head around it, it impresses you". These are just two of many positive comments that we got about our film, a large majority of the comments were positive and the only real negative feedback was about the confusing storyline.  

With our audience feedback in mind we included certain things in our film to ensure the meaning was apparent to them. One thing we did was use a shot reverse shot technique between the main character and the clock to show the passing of time. The clock says its 12:18 it then cuts back to the close up of the main character looking back across to his computer. Finally it then cuts back to the clock which is now at the time 1:49. This breaks continuity purposely which contrasts with other films because most films try to keep continuity. It breaks continuity because it becomes obvious it is a film with the passing of time being so quick. This helps us to give the audience the message that something abnormal is happening and also that the main character has been sat at his desk for a large amount of time.

 Another thing we did was had the main character answer the phone and put it in a jug of water when he doesn’t get a response.  Their is diagetic sound of bubbles that are visible coming from the phones ear piece. This is confusing because instead of just simply putting the phone down he decides to hang up a different way, this also further implies that he has anxiety problems. There is then another eye line match as the character looks towards a clock on the wall. The shot matches to a close up of the clock, and then cuts to an extreme close up of the phone in the jug with more bubbles coming from it. This relates the effect of time on the phone call, maybe who ever has called them has given them a set time to do something.

 We also linked our cross-cut scenes, as the outdoor roof scene is meant to be something going on in his head linked to his writers block we decided to link things that happen in reality to this to make it obvious what is happening one example of this is what was earlier spoke about where he is hitting I on his keyboard he is saying "I, I, I" on the roof. Another example is when he cuts his hand outside and then on the roof on the other scene he looks down to see his hand is cut in the exact same place. By linking the two scenes in these ways helps the audience to understand what's going on this reveals the overall meaning of the film and helps the audience to understand that maybe the character has writers block and it has caused him some kind of psychological issues. Although we created the film with the idea that the scene of him on the roof was caused by the issues the character has by having the hooded figure in both scenes and having surreal elements in both allows the audience to create their own interpretations of what is real in the film. There are many different theory's and interpretations and none of them get confirmed at the end of the film this allows the audience to take what they want from the film.