During the pre production stage of my film, I used target audience feedback to get an overall opinion on the drama genre, as I knew I wanted to focus on character development, which requires an emotional connection with the audience. For this I used the Google forms software that allows people to complete a questionnaire via email. The software allows for a feedback form, that plots the quantitative data on a graph/chart, to allow me to quickly see the general opinion of the audience. I learned that 83% of the audience I asked liked the Drama genre, So I knew I could continue to pursue this style. To add to this, I asked questions about how my target audience consumes films, and the top three were Netflix, Amazon prime and Youtube, so I planned to use Youtube due to its accessibility to distribute my short film. As I hadn’t started writing the script, I also asked qualitative questions about my general narrative concepts. The majority felt positive towards the concept of having a homeless man living a fantasy as I had responses such as “something unique and very appealing.”

Even though it was good, 25% of the responses said they didn’t like the narrative, meaning I could alter the story to approach a wider audience, so I kept this in mind when filming, however I should have listened to some of the responses sooner, as the second audience response still questioned the structure of the ending. I used this opportunity to ask the audience what they felt about the music, as it was quite a niche style that I saw used in the TV series Mr Robot. The music had an overwhelmingly positive response which was encouraging, as they agreed that the theme of daydreams in the songs has a nice link to the reality vs fantasy reference in my film. On top of this I received informal audience responses when writing my own music for the film, as I created various samples for last last quarter of the film, one of which had the majority of praise when comparing the mood in the scene where Oscar has the epiphany of getting a job.

After the first draft of my film was done, I hosted a screening with a selection of people from my target audience, by playing it on the big screen and recording their response. I learnt from this screening that the age group I was focusing on were less keen on the slower narrative than I was, teaching me that I need to address the audience pleasures before myself. In order to address this, I decided to increase the rhythm of the cuts and remove some unnecessary shots to speed up the narrative, whilst a sample from the audience stated I should make it “more climactic.” This caused me to to re-film the ending of my film in order to completely change the direction and mood for a more thriller orientated style. As my target audience was teenagers, I still had to act impressionistically when displaying the murder, in order to keep the ending ambiguous.

This shot was used to represent Ryan’s death, along with a blood soaked letter, as the pea coat represents the rich upper class that have looked down on Oscar, and by swinging it over his shoulder, the underdog has triumphed over the antagonist.

As well as this, there were some technical errors that removed the audience from the film: one being audio transitions, and the other dialogue levels. The audio transitions were an easy fix as I had already been aware of this problem, so I had decided to use some ambient noise from each scene, or some found online, to mask the cuts between audio tracks. More importantly though, the target audience said they couldn't really understand the dialogue as the result of some loud background noise that could not be removed. Due to the complexity of the scene and the time I had, I couldn't refilm this, so I opted for a more stylistic narration performed by myself to go over the top of the original audio, quoting the dialogue whilst doing so. This allowed me to explain the narrative more effectively, and lower the sound of the loud background noise, proving a successful redraft to my target audience.

My poster underwent many mock versions before my target audience classed it as effective. The original version featured a photoshop effect and a studio shot photograph of my protagonist, however it was quickly pointed out that the effect was too artificial. To fix this, I used the same background and text, whilst changing the main image to a simple side shot of the character. This was an improvement as the drama genre features the characters, but the studio photo shoot had limited what I could present in the background. After consulting with my target audience and actor, we agreed to re shoot the images for the poster on location, so I planned for a sunset photo shoot that would provide me with pleasing lighting that I had seen on the tangerine film poster. This was positively revived after the edit due to it’s stripped back style and composition. The audience response was important as I had been too ducked on the editing stage to notice I was forgetting about the genre I was producing for, which allowed me to start over with more effective results.

Audience wise, my film review was rather successful on the first draft. They liked the stereotypical text that explores themes in the film, without ruining the ending, as it persuades the reader to want to go and see the film. Moreover, the structure was praised for looking professional, however It was pointed out to me I was lacking some of the conventions from the magazine I had taken inspiration from: Empire. This meant I had to go back and look at the finer details of the magazine page, which allowed me to add page numbers and website links in the footer of the page, whilst ensuring I maintained a 3 columned text structure.

I also added a border and shadow to this image, to give a more ordered appearance, after a comment was made that the images didn’t fit together.