WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?EVALUATION 3

Audience feedback is really important and especially if it's from your specific target market.  It can help you to improve upon work and make it even better to achieve the best and to hit the criteria and reach what the audience want and what the audience are expecting from a noir/neo-noir.

Through surveys, focus groups and peer/teacher opinions we collected a range of feedback on different aspects of our project throughout.

In the beginning during the researching process, I created a survey to find out what my target market would expect to find in a modern film noir and the conventions that they thought were most likely to be found in a noir. I asked specific audiences film noir questions. I changed the way in which the questions were asked as my younger audience of demographic didn’t know much about film noir. I wanted a broad demographic, a hybrid audience so I decided from this audience feedback that it won’t just be pure classic film noir. From this audience research it helped me make final decisions on aspects of my film trailer and allowed me to make my product audience specific and give them what would appeal to them. Below are some screenshots of just some of the pie charts showing the results.

We also gave our synopsis to a group of our target market. Some of the feedback said:

‘’It didn’t give much away.’’

‘’Like it as it’s mysterious, and isn’t full on classic noir’’

‘’Comes across as a film you have to think about, like a puzzle. Really like that aspect!’’

In response to our feedback of our synopsis we said that we didn’t want the trailer to be really obvious that’s why it’s not giving to much away as one of the big things for the trailer is that it’s a whole mystery. Also we wanted to create a good modern day film noir but keep those classic film noir aspects with in this and we wanted the trailer and film to give an intellectual pleasure to the audience, so therefore the fact they said it’s like a puzzle means that this factor is a success and the synopsis does it’s job and appeals to the intended target market.

From the feedback we then gave a much larger group of our target audience the synopsis and a list of film titles that me and my partner came up with based on the synopsis and our ideas. We asked them to vote which title they thought worked best in representing the synopsis, which one was the most appealing , the most noir style and which one stood out the most to them. This also conformed with ‘Maslows hyeraki of needs’- How the audience reacted to their pleasure with our synopsis and so potentially the trailer.

The gender debate. When showing our class our mock up of the film poster the main feedback we received was the question who is the main character? We agreed with that feedback so in response we looked back and revised the poster, we mixed it about and put the male character at the forefront, so audiences identify that he is potentially the main character. Another thing pointed out was that we had not included a major convention of film posters; a pull quote. This was because we wanted teacher and audience opinion on where it should be placed on the poster as to me it didn’t really fit anywhere but when feedback was given and we moved things about we found a suitable place to position it and look effective. Also taking on teacher feedback we wanted to challenge the conventions. We felt that with the two characters giving direct eye contact and addressing the audience head on this was feeling like it was giving too much away, and wasn’t conforming with the idea of mystery so we decided the characters would be looking away from the camera.

We also discussed the background, although we have incorporated the noir clique of shadows in the mock up but the rest was really boring and didn’t work with the whole noir style of the film but also it didn’t give that professional look that I wanted to achieve.

Therefore we decided we would have the background black and to have the characters move over to the other side more and take up more of the open space, this way it will create more of an impact and make the most of the space. The good aspects that the target audience pointed out were the fact that we included our logo within our film title but also they really liked the logo itself incorporating the shadow and silhouette which are classic noir conventions. With this they liked the way that the triangle shape of the logo created a barrier between the two characters, saying they felt it created clash which they liked.

When taking the images for our film poster I wanted to take the shots of what I wanted

first then to get audience feedback on them. The images below show the progression images following from audience feedback

The first image doesn’t really have bold enough shadow and the lighting is quite bland and doesn’t really do anything to the image, but also decided was the eye contact, she’s looking too downwards which didn’t look right,then progressing on, the second image, more lighting was added making the image more dramatic and more in the style of film noir although the characters face is very bright, so decided less lighting was to be on the face. Then the last image is very dramatic, with the face half dark half light connoting evil and good etc but also the shadow is very defined which I really like and the feedback also praised this.

We kept showing our trailer to our teacher and our target market through out the whole progression of our trailer to gain feedback in order to improve on the trailer. We needed our trailer to be a little bit more authentic and credible from the first teacher feedback, so we re-shot the first few scenes which we gained feedback on again and this time kept in mind that we needed them to create a sense of realism. At first when we shot this scene we have the character flicking her hair, at first we didn’t have the right lighting so it gave the audience the wrong impression on the character. Also the angle isn’t obscure enough so not giving that noir feel but also the characters head is half cut off, and so doesn’t look very professional. After we videoed this shot again, we got the lighting and the focus right and this allowed the audience to then understand and get the right idea about the character from what they haveconnoted from the lighting.