What have you learned from your audience feedback? (Question 3)

Teacher Feedback

Throughout the media project I have had feedback from my tutor/teacher on how to improve my final products on every draft. This consisted of being given strengths and weaknesses of the blog to guide me in the correct direction. I took this advice on board and altered my products accordingly; these changes came in the form of changing specific shots throughout the sequence and even completely taking certain scenes out. The main place that this was placed was the basketball sequence; at first we didn’t have this sequence planned or shot because we had the beach scene. However after being told that this flashback sequence was one of my strengths adding another scene like this was advised.

After shooting the basketball sequence the first time we found that it was too staged, this was reinforced in the feedback we got from our teacher. So after taking this feedback on we re-shot it to be more natural. We also changed the characters in the sequence and used two other, younger actors who are aged between the main character and his first flashback. This allowed us to create a growth in age of the characters, and also allowed for the acting to be natural. This was majorly important as the first shot of the basketball sequence was too staged and didn’t look real, both us and our teacher agreed on this so it did need to be changed. As a group we decided at the begging that the ending would be open and up to the audience to decide how they would take it. Our teacher, in the feedback agreed with this. Although the first ending we had was too open and from our first piece of out-group feedback, we knew that we had to make the older brother’s death more obvious.

Our teacher feedback also gave us direction in our ancillary texts, for example the use of our names in the poster e.g. who did what in the credits. This was because we only worked in a two so it was difficult to write out who did what without repeating our names. But because of the poster that we looked at showed us the casts and directors names we had to repeat ourselves so it could look correct in comparison to the industry.

New media Feedback and Use

Facebook

Facebook is the easiest way to get feedback on all of our texts as it is just uploading images and videos. It is also very easy to find our target market on their because it is between 16 and 25 which is the mean age of our ‘friends’ on the site so it easy to get their feedback.

This gave us a lot of analytical advice and feedback on the poster:

However getting this information was something that we decided to do on the last edits of our texts as it is more ready for an audience to view it then. Also the teacher feedback was more useful at the start because that is advice within the industry. So the use of feedback from audiences was fulfilled more at the end of the progress because we didn’t want to deviate from what we wanted to do and we could just alter it at the end.

Keek

Using Keek to advertise and gain feedback was difficult and risky because it is a relatively new website that doesn’t have many users as twitter and Facebook. This means that there aren’t many people to give feedback because not many people would see the posts. So we didn’t get any feedback from Keek, but the site has potential to gain feedback because of its video sharing qualities.   

Twitter

Gaining feedback from twitter was easy because of the sites easy to find content. However because of the letter count it was difficult to get any feedback that could help in the design other than people just saying that they liked it or not. It is much more helpful to get full paragraphs and not just one sentence because that allows us to gage a much more accurate response. So we used twitter as more of an advertising technique to get people excited for the film rather than gain feedback. Also, because of the frenetic nature of the site it is very easy for these posts to get lost in the mass of content and not many people would see it or answer. This is because it is used as a small update device that people don’t focus on too much so it is difficult to keep people’s attention. This is why Facebook is more useful as people can focus on it and it allows for more time.