Audience Feedback: Audience Feedback From Our Film

Method

We showed our nearly completed thriller to eight people in our year at CNS to gain some opinions on what they thought of it so far, and what they think could be made better. We tried to ask either media students and film fanatics so they had an idea about what should be in a thriller film (such as signifiers). We are aware this is not our ideal target audience, but we collected the data during school times so we could not do this.
We asked five males and three females our questions, and we thought this was sticking to our target gender which is male. We asked three females too, as although our target gender was male, females could enjoy the film, too.
Even though it was not the perfect sample to ask, we still think it was a useful exercise and gave us a good source of information on what to improve and what was already good.

We asked each person to watch our film, and then answer our short questionnaire we prepared.

Here are the questions we asked:

Gender:

Was the Mise-en-scene appropriate?

Was the music effective?

Was the narrative readable?

Was the lighting effective?

What aspect of it did you like the most?

How could it be improved?

Findings


We found that we ended up with very positive feedback from our participants. Everyone answered that the Mise-en-scene was appropriate. For the question “was the music effective?” everyone again agreed that it was and particularly good comment from one male was “it built tension and a good atmosphere”. A female participant thought that our music could have been better. Everyone agreed the narrative was readable except for one male, but he added to this by saying “not knowing what is going on adds mystery to the film” which was a positive comment. Knowing whether the narrative was readable was the most important question to us because you have to make a link between the building, man and the dead body. And although it is obvious to us, we wondered whether it would be to everyone else. Every participant answered that the lighting was very effective. I was very glad about this as I thought this was a strong point in our film.

For the next question which was “what aspect of our film did you like the most” we got very interesting feedback.
Two males and one female picked music as their favourite aspect of our film.
While another three picked the extreme-close up on the man at the desk as their favourite.
Another favourite from the remaining participants was the quick editing and flashing transitions and the slow motion effects of the man at the desk, and the fast motion effect of the boot being closed.
Our final question was “what could be improved?” some people did not give an answer to this question as they thought nothing could be improved we did receive one that said the cast could have fit the age description of the characters better, and the costumes could have been more authentic. We know there is nothing we can do at this point but it is something we would take into consideration if we were to do this again. Another suggestion we received was to extend the slow motion sections, we took this into consideration and made some of it longer, and agreed that in the end it did look better and was an improvement to our film.

Conclusion

We were pleased with all of our positive feedback, and thought that the negative feedback was also very helpful. Overall the exercise helped us improve our film. And was a good idea to carry out. The feedback has given us more confidence into finishing our film as best we can.