Evaluation Question

What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

When gaining feedback from our teacher on "The story of an Hour" she felt that many of the shots were clumsy and not well placed.  She wasn't getting the right feel from the piece.  We therefore knew we needed to be inspired by our work.  We were not initially inspired by our film idea, and this was visible to the audience.  We therefore learnt that our audience will be inspired and captivated if we are when creating it.  

During the duration of the Blur project we have continually asked our target audience their opinions on all of our products through social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.  Gaining audience feedback has been very important in the improvement and development of our products constantly throughout the duration of research and planning.

Facebook:

This has been our main communication with our audience, and the social-networking site where we gained most of our feedback.  Facebook has allowed us to embed videos from youtube, post screenshots from the film and pictures of our review page and poster to gain audience comments, whether good or bad.  Not all of my friends on facebook/people who commented and gave opinions are passionate about film.  Some had a general interest, others more passionate.  This gave us a wider scope of opinions on our products so that we could really develop our film.  

Above is an example of one of my posts on facebook, showing our target audience our film poster, and asking for more feedback, and one of the comments from our target audience.  This comment suggests that we change the background to a different colour.  Although we felt that this background colour is the perfect colour for the background, we did agree that the font colour was too close to the background.  We therefore went away and changed the font colour to improve our image.   This feedback was very important to us.  From making the poster myself, sometimes it is hard to judge your own work, and to quickly think that other people will like it.  From gaining feedback, we can make sure we keep following audiences likes.  

We also gained feedback on our first draft of our film on facebook.  

Although our first draft had pieces missing, our audience reacted well.  They loved the calming effect of the footage and how the editing flows smoothly.  However, they found the music repetitive, and gradually boring.  When re-drafting we therefore focused on getting the extra footage and also in developing and changing the music, making it less repetitive.  This feedback, like before enabled us to improve our product, giving us focus points to work on.  From this feedback we learnt that our audience wants more shots using bokeh, and to maintain the "professionally" captured theme. 

Although we did not gain any feedback from youtube, twitter or tumblr, we did post regularly on these sites to gain interest and promote our film and products.  After the first couple of months, we saw that we were gaining lots of interest on facebook, so began to focus more on promoting out film on facebook.  

While it is important to gain a wide range of opinions from people with different passions and backgrounds, I also asked my teachers and class colleagues.  I was gaining some general statements of "I like this", which are non-detailed responses.  From my teachers and colleagues, I could get detailed criticisms which focused on "what worked" well and "even better ifs".  This helped us to keep on track, and to continually develop our products.  

From our first draft we have made the following changes to our products due to audience feedback:

• Soundtrack - we have made the music less repetitive, and more uplifting, yet maintaining the flow and rhythm of the piece.  
• We made sure that the theme and style of our film was maintained throughout our piece, and that all the shots were at the same level as each other
• We also posted screenshots from our film onto facebook, and asked them to vote which image would be perfect for a poster.  We then used the images that the audience picked and used them on our final poster. 
• Changed shots that did not fit in with the rest of the film - e.g. close up shot of bee hive - was said to be too by by an audience member, and that it didn't fit in with the rest of the dark background shots.  - We replaced this shot with a mid shot of a Ferry.  It is a darker shot and fits in with the theme of travel/journey throughout
• We changed the font colour on the poster so that the audience can read the text. 

Below are a serious of images of the changes made.

Image one is a screenshot of a close up we removed due to audience feedback.  The audience member said that she liked the shot, yet didn't feel that it fitted in with the theme and style of the film.  She said that unlike the other shots, this shot was very bright, and contrasted too extremely to fit in.  After attempting to manipulate the saturation of the shot on premiere and not being successful we decided to replace it with a shot of a passing ferry (shown in image 2, top line on the right).  The audience member felt this shot fitted perfectly, and maintained the style and theme of the film.  However, initially the ship moved in a diagonal line.  Our teacher felt that this didn't work with the ship traveling at this angle.  Jess decided to try leveling the ship.  After the change, our teacher felt that this worked perfectly.  

Audience members felt that the shot shown in image 4 did not fit in with the other words and symbols.  However, they liked the effect it create.  To create this, instead of zooming in, passed the lens hood, I did the opposite and zoomed out to show the lens cover.  The lights shown through the cover and created a different type of bokeh.  This is our own original experimentation with the technique, so I felt it was important to experiment further and use more titles like this one.  Image 3 is a screenshot of my further experimentation.  Audience members liked the "wander" shot, and felt it added to the feel of quirkiness and the originality of our film.  

Our music starts off quite gently, and then gradually speeds up.  Most of our footage is slow or has been slowed down during the editing process.  Audience members liked the calming feeling, but felt that the rhythm of the film could be slightly quicker in places.  I went and filmed more traffic scenes, which Jess suggested to speed it up in her edit.  To maintain the theme of blurred footage, we then put a directional blur which created even more pace.  After adding it to our film, audience members loved the mix of slow and quick paced, and said that it really covered and explored all types of travel, whether it be rushed or whether it be slow and graceful.