Audience Feedback from Final Cut

Audience Feedback 

Throughout the process of production, we have asked our audience and target audience what they thought, recording their feedback and analysing it. We asked them a questionnaire pre production after being read the synopsis, we asked them a questionnaire after showing them a rough cut of the film, and this post is an analysis of the feedback from the audience after watching our finished short film, Saving Grace. 

We asked the audience questions not only about the film that they watched, however we asked them questions about themselves, this is in order for us to distinguish what an audience of different Ages, Genders and Occupations think about our film and their honest opinion of it as a whole. This would also tell us if our expected target audience had positive reactions to our film rather than the survey being completely anonymous. The survey was created on SurveyMonkey and shared on different types of social media as well as word of mouth, ensuring that the audience wasn't biased in any way in order for our results to be completely valid in terms of participants. The questions that were asked are as followed: 

This questionnaire was shown to people via social media and the audience, without being spoken to by one of the members of our group, filled in the questionnaire after watching the whole short film. The questionnaire includes questions with multi choice for quantitative information and comment boxes for qualitative information, this allows us to gain more information from the audience and allows us to analyse further what they believe about the film. We included simplistic questions such as "What rating would you give our film?" and also included more intricate questions such as "What was your favourite part of the film?" which requires the audience to think about the short film and what happened, which raises more awareness of the topic issue of dangerous drinking. 

Over the hours that we gave the audience to complete the questionnaire, we collected 32 samples of survey answers, with an audience of different ages, genders and occupations, this gave us a variety of different results. Due to the questionnaire being anonymous and the survey being posted on social media, we understood that not all answers are guaranteed to true or accurately present how they felt about the film, we recognised this within the results. The results were as followed. 

 The first question that we included in the questionnaire was "What is your age?". Our questionnaire is anonymous however we thought in order to gain an idea of our audience and what specific people thought we should ask the audience key factors such as age. Our film has a certificate of 12A, meaning nobody under the age of 12 should be viewing the film unless accompanied by an adult. Our film also had a target audience of people aged 15-25, as we assumed a younger audience would enjoy the film more, which was proven as the majority of the audience were aged 18-24, however we also had a varied audience of different ages.

 We also asked the audience about their gender, which wouldn't reveal too much about the audience however tells us wether our audience was predominantly male or female, when planning the audience research we said our film wouldn't be favourable over genders and didn't predict a larger audience of either gender, however it is evidenced that there is a much larger audience of the female gender, and a smaller audience of other genders. 

The final question which was personal to the audience asked them about their occupation, this could potentially tell us how much free time that person has, and could tell us wether they watch films often and if their opinions are from an experienced film watcher. We predicted that the majority of the audience would be students as our target audience was of ages 15-25 and a large amount of people this age are students. The questionnaire revealed to us that the majority of our audience and participants are in fact students, as we predicted.

After we had gathered general information about the audience, we decided to ask a simple question first of all to the audience and ask them if overall they understood the film. We decided to ask the audience this as our film isn't of linear structure, therefore some of our audience may be confused about what is happening in the film. The results displayed that the majority of the audience understood the film which is very positive feedback and tells us that our film was edited well and made easy to understand, for the majority of our audience. 

 In pre production of the film, we conducted research into genre and while writing the synopsis of the film we decided that our film was of the Thriller genre, and realised that it had aspects of a Drama. From the audience's feedback we found that the majority of the audience believed that the film was a Drama, and around 2/5 of the audience believed that the film was a Thriller, this told us that the codes and conventions that we included in our film were more suited to a Drama genre than a Thriller, for example setting and mood of the overall film.

We asked the audience if they overall enjoyed our short film, the majority of the audience said that they enjoyed it, however we had some of the audience saying they were unsure. We also had an audience member which said they didn't enjoy our film. Within the questionnaire we had inappropriate comments, which we understood might happen due to the questionnaire being posted for anonymous comments on social media, however we also took into consideration that there might be a reason for an audience member to genuinely dislike our short film.

We also asked the audience what they would rate our film out of five, similar to a star rating. A very large amount of the audience gave the film 5/5, and the majority of the audience gave a positive feedback number which we were pleased with, however there was an extraneous result of 1/5 which we questioned if this was a real result. However we looked further into the questionnaire to look for negative as well as positive feedback as we understood that the concept might not attract every single person in the audience.

After gaining some potential negative feedback we analysed a question which allowed the audience to give criticisms to us, the majority of our audience told us that there was nothing specific within the film they would change. However minor comments told us that we should've been more accurate within filming which was useful criticisms. We also gained feedback which told us the audience member didn't quite understand what was happening in the film as we didn't make it obvious, this criticism helped us thoroughly. 

Gaining negative feedback helped us understand why our audience might not have liked our short film, however asking the audience gave us a chance to understand what the positive comments were from the audience. The majority of the audience claimed that their favourite parts were "The nightclub scene"'s, and "The ending", which is where most of our editing and techniques were, which told us that our film displayed shots and different types of editing well, especially towards the end where the scenes begin getting increasingly intense and high energy.

The final question again asked the audience wether they understood the film, but also asked them if they understood the message of the film, this is in reference to our group wanting to raise awareness of safe drinking and the risks of drugs. The feedback told us that the majority of the audience understood what the film was about and the message that the film had with it. However it also told us that some of our audience didn't understand or so much, which made us understand that in order to get a message across to an audience we must be more straight forward with our storyline rather than being non linear.

After analysing the questionnaire results from the 32 audience members, we gathered that the majority of the audience enjoyed our film, understood it and had overall general positive feedback for our group. We gained feedback that told us that the way our short film was shot and edited was very good overall, also from the feedback we can assume that our film made an impact on the majority of the viewers and hopefully we raised awareness of the topic involved.