Evaluation Q3- What have you learned form your audience feedback?

Throughout my project, i have constantly asked the public for feedback on our film, ancillary texts and what certain colours provoke. As well as this, i constantly sought to find out if our titles, products and ideas were acceptable for the topic we wished to showcase. The feedback good or bad, really helped to refine our ideas and critique our own work form a different perspective. This system of using social networking sits, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram also allowed us to take in suggestions on how to improve our ideas, as well as letting us know which aspects our audience enjoyed and liked, which was really helpful for my group in understanding if we were on the right path.





Facebook

Facebook was our main source of feedback and we used this social network right from the beginning of our project, to ensure that we were fully grasping the concept of what we wished to achieve. We uploaded questions, new pieces of footage, music, posters and a review for our audience to look at and comment, the good thing about this being was that we managed to gain feedback from a variety of people within different age groups, making it comforting to know that a variety of people had centred their commentary around the same aspects as one another, which made it evident that that aspect was either good, or needed improving. Facebook overall was our most successful Social Networking Site for feedback as it allowed us to do everything technical that Twitter and Instagram did, but in a different formate, which i found much easier, finding also, that feedback was quicker and more insightful.























Although we got good feedback from the music itself (not the recording) the feedback on the recording, made us want to change the music entirely, whilst we were recording the same piece of music, we started to experiment with different types of tones and sounds which lead us to the music we now have within the final film. Although initially changing the piece of music was not part of our idea, due to that information from audience feedback, is the reason why we eventually changed, and in my opinions, and others by our recent feedback of our final film, improved the sound. 


We also used Facebook to post our final poster which got great reviews, making my group happy with the poster that we had finally produced. Even though we got some constructive criticism, we decided to stick to the final lay out of our poster, as we felt that the tagline was just as important as the title in this domestic abuse short film.

Our Film drafts and final film

This is some feedback from our final film

For our final film it seems that there is minor criticism, however, the overall feedback was positive and i feel that my group has done a sufficient job in refining our film to make it what it is today. We have managed to progress and develop through our audience feedback, and by closely listening to what they have to say, have now managed to satisfy our audience in creating a  polished final piece. However feedback from previous Facebook posts about our film drafts did contain some constructive criticism which we successfully managed to change. 

Shots that were brief and in-concise were scrapped to make the footage solely focus on a particular point of interest. Although we kept the symbolism of the balloon, we felt that shots such as the ones to the right did nothing that benefited towards our topic. The more edits shown to the audience, the better the feedback was. It became apparent that the more condense and precise our footage was, made it easier for the audience to follow and understand without going on a tangent. 




Adding narration within the film, also made the audience more involved with what was happening. The tracking shot of taking the audience into the story with the narration alongside, help our audience to feel more of an emotional connection. Members of the public exclaiming ' i felt helpless' . This was exactly the response we wanted and was created by taking the audience back out of the story with a panning out shot, which reminds them that they are watching a campaign. 

This is how we made these symbolic shots valuable

Feedback on review pages 


Old review page

Feedback from my teacher, told me that the size of the photo on this review was too small and needed enlarging. This was useful feedback, which i decided to take into consideration, pursuing me to change the sizing so that the image was larger and more prominent. This also made the review more aesthetically pleasing, and also made the review more striking as it had a larger picture, which would catch the readers attention. 

                                                                                  

Feedback on the written content was also good, some saying it was 'well written' and an 'interesting read' when talking to my peers and teachers. So i felt that the only thing necessary to change was the image.







Twitter

Myself and my group members used twitter to document filming dates and ask opinions on our posters by uploading photos of our current poster or decisions that we had made about the poster. Twitter was used in a different way to Facebook for some aspects. Facebook posts, could be seen by viewers who were already friends with us, however, with twitter, random members of the public can choose to follow your posts and updates, which allowed the feedback given to be more honest and opinionated, instead of just compliments which we seemed to get from Facebook. However, unlike Facebook, Twitter seemed to have its faults. We found it difficult to initially see the posts of the photos and video without clicking on it, which meant that we could not entice our audience to see what we had produced without firstly making them click on the link, where as with Facebook, the Videos and posters were already displayed on the screen, which allowed our product to interest our audience to see what it was about and therefore, for the majority of the time, lead to them commenting feedback.

Firstly before asking for feedback on our products and film, we thought it would be interesting to initially used Twitter for research purposes to ask what the colour of red meant to them.

 

Feedback thankfully gave us the information that we were looking for as some of them said that the colour red connoted 'Danger' and ' Pain' which is what we wanted to associate the colour with. This lead to us changing the initial costume to suit the new colour and its connotations. This colour was again picked up within our final film when shows for feedback.

Teacher Feedback

As well as using Social Networking Sites, my group also turned to our Media Teacher for feedback about what we were doing and the progress we made. The good aspects of this being was that we got feedback from a professional in this area, which really helped us develop our understanding on how we wanted our final film and ancillary texts to look like, so that they were at a professional standard. By asking our teacher, it also meant that we could get feedback there and then and did not have to wait, as sometimes when we asked on the online websites, they took some time to reply. We acted on many suggestions which our teacher had.


What also lead us to a change in costume, was our teacher's feedback.

She suggested reflecting over the current characters costume and chosen characters appearance. This reflection over our work, made us realise that we were being too generic with our simple, insignificant costumes as they were not challenging enough. After some discussion, we decided to change the overall appearance of our protagonist as that would be the best possible option to make our film more symbolic in terms of its didactic message.

These were our old costumes

These are our new costumes and overall apearance.

Instagram


This phone app, was incredibly good at getting feedback on photos as Instagram is a photo sharing website. However, this meant that we could only upload photos or screenshots of questions we wanted answered, which made it extremely difficult to get quick and easy feedback, as it was hard for our audience to create a full response to the questions asked due to limited text space. Due to this problem, we decided to use Instagram mainly to showcase our recent sample posters to gain feedback, which would help to decide on our final poster.

 The final poster was influenced by this comment about it being simple. We took this poster for inspiration towards our final poster, as it seemed that they liked the colour of black and white which was different from the other poster samples.

The blending of the images of our child and protagonist for our final poster was decided by feedback from this poster, as a member of our audience commented about how the child's face is 'haunting' which is exactly what we wanted her to be within the poster and film, as she is a constant reminder to our audience that this topic is unacceptable as she looks into the eyes of our audience.



Our final poster as you can see has been influenced by this feedback from Instagram. The child remains looking into the eyes of our audience and we decided to do the whole image in black and white, as well as merging two images together to create a more interesting composition.

Conclusion


Having audience feedback from different types of people, was really beneficial towards our ancillary product and final film, as it made myself critique my own work from a different view point, exposing myself to different interpretations that could be used within my film, review and poster. It made me add and take away some aspects from our film and poster, allowing our audience to fully understand the concept of what our poster is trying to represent. By listening to my feedback, it ensured that our own ideas and the ones from feedback were intertwined within the project as a whole, so that the texts became more relatable and understandable for our target audience.



The things we changed


> The music and its recording
> The poster colour and positioning from its original state
>The costumes within the film
> The title
>Changing the size of the image in the review
>Excluding shots that snatched our audiences attention away from the situation in hand
>condensing narrative
> Having a voice over instead of just music, so that it was that bit more accessible for those who might not grasp the films purpose.



The biggest change to our production being the ending, where it completely comes away from the 'story' and shows the triumph of our protagonist. This ending was suggested by our teacher, so that the audience can fully establish that it is a campaign. This ending presents the 'light at the end of the tunnel' for those out there who desire freedom and liberation.