Hannah Wakely's A2 Coursework
Evaluations
Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Once I had chosen Magical realism as the genre of my film, I had to decide on a target audience. Initially, I chose 15-20s as it is my age group and I thought my film would attract that audience. However, I did a lot of research and found that this genre usually attracted people in their mid 20s to 30s, middle class, Europeans. It is a really interesting genre, as Luis Leal said: “In magical realism key events have no logical or psychological explanation. The magical realist does not try to copy the surrounding reality or to wound it but to seize the mystery that breathes behind things.”
All of these films target an audience between 15/18 and early 30s so this is why I changed my initial target audience.
When I put the 1st edit of my film up, I still had a few shots to film and a lot that I knew needed modifying, so I didn’t show it to my audience straight away, as I already knew what wasn’t good. For my 2nd edit, the main thing that was mentioned, is that the ending was confusing. So as one person suggested, I added a shot where the writer disappears and the only thing left is an empty chair. I also deleted and re filmed most of my shots, with better lighting and making sure that the camera didn’t shake.
This made me realized that what I thought was clear, needed explaining more for my audience, so I changed my initial ending to reach my audience’s expectations.
My 3rd and 4th edits are very similar as I was planning on doing some additional filming so I wanted to have a bit more feedback from my audience before I did so, in case they thought of something else that I should re film.
I modified everything that my audience told me to, I reduced the length of the scrunching up of paper, added a sound effect of a sneeze and added a rewind sound at the end. The main comment this time was that some parts of my film were either not believable/clear enough or too long. So I learned that I had to make it a little clearer and knew that with the use of music and sound, this would be easier. I also came up with a new idea after my audience’s responses and decided to add a character as the writer’s boss, to add flashbacks and make my film more interesting and give a bit of background to why the writer had to write this story. My audience responded really positively to it.
For my 5th edit:
These were the responses for my 5th edit and it was very encouraging. They liked my new idea which showed that I had understood what my audience wanted to see. However, I had intentionally desaturated the shots of the boss, more and more throughout my film, to empathies the lack of emotions coming from him, which seemed to have not been understand by one member of my audience. So, in my next edit, I made that even clearer by desaturating more. I thought about the proposition to add a female voice as well, but then thought it would be to confusing. I changed the sound motif’s emplacement a bit at the end, resulting from what Tess had said.
For my 6th and 7th edit:
My audience didn’t really like the fonts that I originally chose. So, as a result, that changed my vision and I chose other fonts for my next edit as I learnt from their comments, that the chosen fonts weren’t very conventional. I found this very challenging and had to try lots of different fonts before finding the one that I liked but it made me realise that my audience didn’t decode my film in the same way that I had encoded it. In my 8th edit, I was still unsure about the fonts and was waiting to see how my audience would respond to them.
7th edit:
8th edit:
Final edit:
I finally found a font that I really liked in my final edit and my audience also thought it fitted well with my genre. The comments on my final edit were very positive and proved to me that even though I changed a lot of elements as a result of my audience’s feedback, I had learnt what they liked and wanted to see in my film and was able to do so. It made me realise that audiences read and understand texts in a very different way than the one I had planned.
Magazine task: link to prezi
Film task:
Poster task:
For my poster, my initial audience choice was an 18-20-year-old group, interested in original, creative independent films. The poster is slightly more sinister looking and dramatic than my film in order to attract a slightly different audience by showing a different side of the film. The poster catches people’s attention very well and is very mysterious and interesting, which is what people that age like. Also, it is quite simple looking and there’s only one main action taking place. However, I ended up broadening my target audience to 18-25s as I think, I had narrowed it down too much causing a small niche audience which wasn’t my aim. Also, to make sure I was not making a mistake, I showed my poster to a lot of people between 16 and 30 and that’s how I narrowed it down, seeing their reactions to it.
1st edit:
For my 1st edit, the main comment was to change the position of the title and its font, to change the quote and to make the background a bit more interesting. I had originally placed these elements like that, as I thought it would be effective, however reading what my audience thought made me realise that they didn’t agree with my original idea and that I needed to change quite a few things. So, I added a gradient to the background, going from black at the top where the hand is (symbolizing the evilness of the writer), to white at the bottom, where the young boy is. I also swapped the emplacement of the title and the actor’s names.
My audience mainly commented on my fonts and the name of my film. I learnt that my audience found fonts very important and that it played a big role in the way that they understood my poster. So, I changed the font of the actor’s names, of the quote and I also changed the title of my film and its font. I hadn’t added the credit blocks at the bottom of the poster yet, so I also did that in my 4th edit. I also had the idea to add shadows at the boy’s feet to give a bit more depth to the picture.
2nd and 3rd edit:
4th edit:
My audience thought that the credit blocks were too squeezed together on the centre and needed spacing out, which is something that I hadn’t thought about. Once again, the way that my audience saw my work was different to my intentions. Also, now that I had changed the font of my title, there was no branding link with my film. So, I changed the font of my title and made it the same font as the one that I used in my film so there was a sense of branding that would be clear to my audience. I also spaced out the credits and rearranged them so that it looked more professional.
Final edit:
The comments were very positive for my final edit. For every edit, I realised that the audience interpreted different things than what I had planned, and I changed a lot of my original ideas to fit their expectations.