3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To create a successful product in the media industry it is vital that you keep up to date with what your target audience take from the end product. As an encoder it’s really important that the decoder sees my film trailer the way i intend them to. This is why audience feedback is valuable to any encoder. Providing regular feedback opportunities at the start and throughout the project is a great way of keeping on track with your progress. Feedback gives you, the producer, a way of altering ideas and remedying any mistakes made and by having that outsiders view can help you notice problems you have not foreseen yourself.

The first piece of audience feedback we received was after we pitched the first draft of our film idea to the rest of the class. This pitch consisted of the storyline, locations, props and key scenes. The general feedback we received from this presentation was positive and viewers said that we had obviously put a lot of thought into it. however, after interviewing a single class mate with specific questions, something was brought to our attention.

This is Betty, a class mate who we interviewed and this is that interview.

This feedback suggested that our storyline was one that has been done to death. This led us to devising an altered plot to our film; after all the aim was to produce a product that had a unique selling point. The newly devised plot involved his son being kidnapped – this added an element of despair to the film as the main character (Mark Steele) loses the one thing he had left. Now Mark Steele must find the people responsible for the kidnapping of his son, whilst on the run from the police force he once worked for. This early stage feedback was extremely useful, otherwise my group and I would have started composing a film trailer that was very much unoriginal.

The next stage of audience feedback that we received was fairly early on in our shooting. We were asked to present a thirty second long clip of our preliminary shots, which i montage together with a drafted soundtrack. After screening the clip, three peers were picked to comment on our clip and I was very happy with the feedback given.

>Click this link to view the comments made on our early footage<

Social networking allowed us as a group to receive feedback on a larger scale as our final trailer was viewed and shared among friends and family. After three weeks of me uploading the trailer onto youtube and facebook it had received 279 views. By linking the video through facebook, viewers were able to comment on the video and click on a ‘like’ button which indicated whether that person liked what they saw. Below is a screenshot taken from the facebook link.

On facebook our video receive 24  “likes” and underneath the video we received numerous amounts of comments, one of which was rather useful as feedback. “ I would definitely watch that… if the ending hadn’t already been revealed by the trailer” This is a very fair comment as he is referring to the scene, which indicates the reuniting of Mark and his son. However, in response to this I stated that the fact that he is reunited with is son his revealed because the story of the film is all about the struggles he goes through to get his son back. Also I thought that this particular sequence of clips were most professional looking given the location, angle and the way they were edited together. These two reasons overpowered any concern of ruining the ending and therefore I made the decision to leave them in – a challenging and fair observation regardless.   

From the various feedback comments I received throughout the project, I can honestly say that the views from others really brought the standard of my work to be the best that it could be. Having that outsiders view and listening to their comments was key to being able to alter certain things and make sure, as an encoder, I was producing a product that met the needs of our target audience.