EVALUATION 3

Q3)  what have you learned from your audience feedback?

Feedback has always been important part of film process, it allows us as film creators to understand what our audiences expect, want and perceive in our film. In ‘Light Through Darkness’ the audience expectations of the genre and visual attention fits to the dramatic and emotional genre, something I feel we met and carried on further with our use of abstract scenes. Feedback at pre-production helped us learn these expectations and had a large influence on shaping our story and film planning, when presenting out different treatments we asked for feedback from the audience-on all three pitches we took many notes to add to our film. All points were absolutely crucial as it helped us recognize what we need to do in order to answer questions that wasn’t made clear at first. In our early stages we had initial ideas of stories based on serious topics such as family problems, then we based our ideas on a ‘Ray’ it had numerous good points which we wanted to use in our film.

From this, our first feedback evolved around a story ‘less repetitive’ while retaining our moral to the story, it needed to be shortened and more the point for our audience. Considering this as a group we created the idea of similar plots conveyed in less time, were we all decided to come up with better storylines and ways it could be shown quicker and more to the point , we brainstormed from there. One of the Ideas I brought forward was ‘Having a normal teenage boy, in a car accident which results in his loss of sight’. Although still a sad subject we looked further into the idea of a ‘disabilities’ and felt we found a balance of a serious message and a  brighter story in our two initial treatments.

We felt the sentiment of the film can apply to any one.  A complete accident that can have a devastating effect on someone’s life.3 Liking both stories we used group assessment to decide on pitch and after realising the issue we may face in finding a suitable actor to act as a blind person, such as the difficulty in acting as realistic as possible to a real blind person. Also our time limit to film would restrain us being able to film in a house off the set and created a risk of us not filming the shots we wanted. Even finding ways to represent blindness with minimal dialogue was something we felt we wouldn’t be able to do well and focused on the acting to be top notch.

Looking back on our first treatments our feedback from our teacher and peers steered our story in a very different direction. We were advised that our film needs to avoid repetition as it will eat up allot of the maximum 5minute time limit given. Our prospect audience felt ‘there’s no closure if he doesn’t overcome some sort of barrier which stands in his way’ and ‘it losses the lesson of the story, how difficult blindness is to deal with’. With further development into our presentation of the film and story we created our final treatment and gained positive feedback about our now stronger storyline (our audience response from out treatments resulted in cutting out the bathroom scene because it eats up too much time and space, we agreed it would be more productive to incorporate black fades to show time passing and more straight to the point). We tightened up visual ideas and story pace by doing so. Our vision was to show the world from a blind person’s point of view representing Kieran’s relationships and how we match the beginning scene to the end scene, but show how his life has changed. We were told this was a good idea to give closure to the film after letting our audience feedback determine some suggestions which they would like to see from the ending we collaborated these ideas and came to a final decision as a group. In the end we decided to have some sort of confidence boost (saving the girl from getting run over).

From our script feedback I learned the need to use clues and foreboding techniques throughout the film to communicate with our audience, before we had a story in place but the storytelling was ‘long’ than it could be.  We needed focus on small visual clues that could help show our narrative to the audience. From this we developed ideas such as diegetic sounds (of a car crash, wheels skidding, sealt belt clicking and slow emotional music).  Similar to our storyboard feedback, that when we experimented more with our shot planning (treatments, presentations, scripts, photo story board, storyboard and blindness research. Mise en scene arrangements it made the film much more appealing by sticking to themes of blindness, blind props such as a walking stick and special sunglasses all relate with the setting the mood of a drama and deep emotional touching film.  Also the example of our series of shots using the car in motion was something we created after learning our original shots was ‘too static’-we incorporated the ‘ghosting effect’.

The post production stage was a vital part in hearing various feedback at different stages while editing our film, allowing us to adapt it to suit the audience. In our films construction we asked media peers and other students there opinion of the film to gain wider criticism. Our original feedback was to firstly shortened or cut down the size of shots that were too long or unnecessary, we learnt this as an important factor of a silent film, that most shots should aim to be ‘too the point’. After cutting down on our rushes and organising our timeline our feedback was mostly positive with 2 main suggests or needs for improvement. Firstly we had feedback from many viewers that the music pieces didn’t flow very well. From this we reviewed our music choices and researched a different piece of music for the beginning scene(different from the final scene), we felt the original fast beat to the beginning music didn’t fit the pace of the rest of the film as it did not help convey the sadness of our main protagonist. We found viewers agreed that the new music we used fitted the pace and the genre of the film much better, they said ‘the music made them even more emotional and affectionate towards them’. Also the transition between music pieces needed improvement being ‘unsynchronised’ and ‘sudden’. To rectify this we had the idea of sectioning the long music piece into smaller pieces and changing volume levels to create a gradual fade out of the music into the next piece. In addition we had the idea of cross fading the music in to the last song, to fit with the story and pace of the film, how it begins and ends in slightly a different way-this was to rectify how much he is progressing and slowly dealing with his disability in a better way. We supported this with the soundtrack and found using the music in this pattern suited the story and helped to create the foreboding atmosphere of something bad getting better which we wanted our audience to feel from the start.

The second piece of feedback we learnt from was our opening scenes and their pace. We were told our beginning pace would do better to match that at the end. The shots of Kieran getting dressed and making his way down the stairs to the kitchen was ‘effective and suited well’. Initially we were sceptical as to whether we agreed with this and if we knew hope to repeat the same pace at the beginning of the film. However we tried to do so immediately, using a variety of shots we had throughout the film and cutting them in a similar style to the ending. We then used these shots together as an introduction to the film and found it worked much better for the audience and to our idea of the opening music being repeat at the ending to create the cycle effect. This feedback I feel was the most altering to our film, but also the best as it created something far better and closer to what we wanted to achieve in our film.

The Ancillary task was more interactive when using feedback as we had the opportunity to receive comments on the blog for both our review and posters. My posters were based on research into different poster layouts and posters of my desired genre (blindness/heartbreak). I attempted to create poster similar to both an older, more classic design, to fit to the idea of old silent films, and a Morden design to appeal to mainstream audiences. My feedback however was mainly of praise and constructive criticism, and I also learned the difference interpretations people gathered from looking at my poster, this helped me use the comments as if they were really the target audience in the real world and how they perceived the poster.

                                                                              
 PICTURE OF PEERS COMMENTS (on poster)
http://babbeyalex12.blogspot.com/2011/11/film-poster.html#comment-form

I was raised on the use of main title font and positioning of ratings and two film shot image on the page. However my main negative feedback was ‘the fonts work but there should not be too many different sizes of fonts as it confuses the look and subverts the professional look’

My review feedback was mostly positive, with little suggestion of change. Again asking both media students and a member of the audience I was told ‘You have really kept to the conventions of the empire magazine, making it believable and easy on the eye. The use of text is plain and simple yet elegant’. This was a convention of Empires reviews I wanted to achieve. The audience review was similar, “I like the contrast or the stages of his life, from the flashback to after the accident , it gives the audience a sense of the mood and theme of the film. I also think that the idea of the light coming through the poster links in with the title of your film "light through darkness". This was the most important to know that my peers could understand what I tried to convey and what they can imagine the story to be about.