Greg's Evaluation Q3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

 



Early on in the pre production stage, we created a short list of questions we wanted to ask our audience which concerned some of our early ideas for the short film. Sofia then went around the college and recorded a few friends answering these questions. She then compiled the footage into this video:

From this feedback, we learned that:

• The title (we had at the time) was effective because it is short, easy to remember and it tells people what the film is about clearly.
• If people were to watch our film, they would expect lots of intense scenes, and a creepy, unsettling tone to the short film, with lots of blood. They also expect lots of mystery in close ups, extreme long shots and low-key lighting.
• Our antagonist should wear dark clothing of the era we set our film in (modern) that will conceal his identity and make him more intimidating.
• People seem keen to watch our short film from what we had told them. This tone and genre we are trying to replicate is something they already enjoy and they seem intrigued by our story and how it's based of Jack the Ripper

 

We felt that we had to change our title because it lacked originality, it gave away too much and there is already a film that exists called 'The Ripper'. We decided to change the title to Exhibit J, which resembles how evidence is labelled at a crime scene (Exhibit A, Exhibit B etc).

 

We also had to change the name of the murderer from Jack the Ripper as that was also unoriginal. We changed the name to J, as it's short, enigmatic and links to the title.

 

We had to get more audience feedback on the title and name, and from this new feedback, we found that.

• The name J is short but effective and mysterious, as it gives away nothing of the murderer's identity
• The title is also quite effective and clever in the way it links to the villain's name.



A month or two later, we completed the short film and Sofia and I posted our short film onto Facebook and encouraged our friends to give us some feedback from the film. Everyone that viewed our short film seemed to really like the film, my post got  6 likes and Sofia's got 7 likes, there was also some very positive comments on Sofia's post.

However, that's as far as we got for feedback from our short film. None of the comments that we received were very constructive, so we couldn't learn anything from it. If I was to do this another time, I would make sure I receive some constructive comments I can use for referral.

After the short film, we made our posters. Sofia posted the posters to Facebook as we knew we could get lots of good feedback from her posts compared to mine. This is the feedback we got from Sofia's post (I've hidden comments that didn't give us anything useful):

From this feedback, we learned that:

• Our posters do convey a creepy kind of tone with the images we used and the lighting on those pictures
• Most people are saying that Sofia's poster is better for setting a creepy tone and creating the atmosphere we want to create, but Callum's poster is better for giving the viewer information about the film.
• One person recommended that we should use Sofia's poster design with the tagline from Callum's poster if we wanted perfect Exhibit J poster.