Evaluation Question 3 - Rebecca

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Throughout the development of our three products, it was important that we gathered feedback from our audience so that we could be sure we were taking on the constructive criticism to make our final promotional package as professional as possible.

Survey
In December 2013, we decided to send out a survey to our peers to find out how effective areas of our narrative would be. We first planned a series of questions to ask within the survey, and then analysed the results.

In our survey analysis, we decided to ask a question to our audience by focusing on one area of our research, privacy.  we discovered some a range of results. When asking our potential audience which kind of camera would be good for showing the victim of our trailer being spied on, we found that a macbook or CCTV would work best. We decided to use a mac book as we had one of these within our group which we could use as a prop within the trailer.

After gathering these results, we used Photoshop to try and create the ideas our audience were looking for:

We also looked into how we were going to tackle our cultural link to metal illnesses and privacy issues, within the teaser trailer. In order to research this we asked the question 'Do you feel that the discrimination at the beginning should be subtle and barely noticeable, or very clear?' We thought this would be useful for us as we would be able to determine when to introduce our cultural link into our trailer. We found that overall it should be introduced quite subtly.

Above you can see the storyboard created from this research.We decided to add the library scene into our trailer, as we thought this would be a good way to introduce the idea subtly as our audience had suggested. It would then become more extreme, as you can see here:

After we had gathered all the results from our initial survey in December, we continued to film the rest of our teaser trailer and worked on planning how we incorporate our research ideas into our editing. In January we managed to create a draft of our trailer, incorporating the ideas given to us from the trailer as best we could. This allowed us to publish the version on YouTube ready for us to receive more feedback on our work for improvement.

YouTube Feedback
Here are some of the responses we received:

From this comment, we learnt that the genre of our film is very obvious from our teaser trailer, however our cultural link of discrimination against those with mental illnesses is perhaps not as clear as we had hoped. However, we can see that our use of media technologies seems to come across in a professional and effective manner, which is definitely a good thing.

Again, here we can see our genre is clear, however our narrative is very unclear to our audience. The idea of our protagonist being schizophrenic isn't clear enough or perhaps we don't have enough time to show our audience this in 1 minute.

From this comment, again is is clear that our narrative is not clear to the audience, but the locations do draw the viewer into our trailer, as they want to know why the characters are there. We have learnt that our sound isn't always perfect but have since been able to go back and improve the layering in iMovie.

This comment tells us that we have a few weaker areas, again the narrative is an issue, and we need to remove a few shots in order to make it clearer for our audience. It is perhaps the fact that we vary from location to location so much that it becomes confusing.

We learnt from this comment that our genre is clear, and that it is clear the protagonist is mentally ill, even if they don't realise she is schizophrenic. We learnt that our montage sequence really helps cement the idea of mental illness, however it is quite obvious we have used a green screen for parts of it.

Finally from this comment we learnt that again, it is obvious our protagonist is mentally ill, and the use of various shots such as the Facebook scene and web cam parts are really effective. This is good for us because we know that people are picking up on our cultural links.

Results and Improvements
Overall you could say that from our audience feedback we have been quite successful in the areas of editing, filming and sound. However it is clear we do have a slight issue with people understanding what our narrative is. This could be fixed by removing some shots which are possibly misleading to the audience, and that would hopefully help the whole teaser trailer flow better. What is apparent is that our montage sequence has been successful, because when people have realised the protagonist has a mental illness, it is often because of the montage. Another thing that was noted is that in some parts the green screen didn't come across as successful as we would have liked, but we did this to the best of our ability using the tools we had available to us.

From these results, we were able to go and improve on areas of our teaser trailer, we removed shots that were unnecessary and could be too confusing for our audience. We change the ordering of some shots and tried to implement the green screen footage with the other footage as best we could so that it didn't look out of place.