Evaluation - Audience Feedback

A while back we invited a group of parents, teachers and friends to a presentation evening at school where ourselves and other groups presented our coursework pieces. As people were watching, we asked them to provide feedback on what they had seen by filling in a pre-formatted questionnaire about our piece.

This has been beneficial for us as it has given us a great idea as to what has worked well and what hasn't - and this is particularly useful as it gives us an idea of what an audience as a whole think of it as a finished piece, as opposed to what just me, Luke, Sir and others in the class think of it as a work in progress.

So what data have we collected, then? We asked the people who were watching to supply their age group (from preset groups), their gender, and their favourite film genre. This gives us a better idea of which groups our feedback is representative of.

As the research documents come to over 50 pages inclusive of the questionnaire pages I'm not going to post them all, but what I am going to post is this document which shows the data pre-analysis, once we'd added everything up, etc..

First thing to note is that although statistics never lie, the source quality of them can be questionable and a great deal of their meaning comes down to interpretation. Some people had neglected to supply their age/gender, and some had left multiple favourite genres etc.. With that said, let's look at the figures.

The primary thing we need to identify are who these opinions are representative of. The mode age group is the 0-20 group, and the mode gender was female - with a 2:1 female:male ratio. Whilst being a very generalised overview, this suggests that the opinions presented here are more representative of females aged 0-20.

Another point we need to work out to identify who these statistics are representative of is to work out what kinds of films the sample group usually enjoy watching. On the questionnaire we left this as an open question to avoid leading the people we asked towards a particular genre, however this does mean that the findings are a little open to question e.g. some people may consider "Spy/Detective" and "Crime" to be one genre.

Most of the people asked identified comedy as their favourite genre - this is especially useful to us as our film is a comedy film, meaning that we can receive feedback from the kind of audience we'd theoretically be marketing towards.

Now to look at the responses...

Question 1: Do you think the choice of settings in the video were appropriate?

52 (94.5% of those who answered this question) people responded positively to the setting, with many specifically mentioning that it makes sense for teenagers to be seen in a school environment.

Question 2: How successful was the video in satisfying the conventions of the genre?

This time around we have 51 positive responses (about 91%) and 5 neutral responses (about 9%) (yeah, I know. Some people didn't answer every question). The fact that most people had positive feedback for this tells us that we are on the right track to fitting into the comedy genre we have been aiming for, though some of the more detailed responses suggested that we could add some more funny moments, whilst some of the neutral feedback said that in some parts it felt like we were trying too hard to be funny, which made the funny moments seem forced. This is something we'd have to keep in mind if we were to rework the intro.

Question 3: How successful is the editing?

Again, mostly positive, with 42 positives, though some people did have mixed views regarding this, with 12 neutral responses and 3 negatives. The points which were picked out mostly regarded the sound, with the overdubs in particular. Some said that they seemed out of time with what was on screen, whilst others felt that some of them were slightly awkward or "a bit dodgy". We did have a fair bit of positive feedback regarding the filter effect on the drinking scene, as they found it effective in context.

Personal thought time - this is actually one of the points which me and Luke had identified prior to the screening (which we attributed to the volume level mixing), so this is most definitely something which would need to be fixed if we were to rework it.

Question 4: How successful were the choice and execution of camera angles and movement?

The cinematography question. 46 were positive, 6 were neutral and 3 were negative. The constructive feedback we received mostly suggested that some of the camera movements seemed shaky - however others felt this was effective in the context of the drinking scene.

This was something we'd acknowledged during the editing process, though unfortunately Oliver had moved away by that point so it wasn't possible to reshoot the affected shots...

Question 5: Was a clear narrative established?

With 48 positive results, 2 neutral results and 2 negative results, it appears that the audience appreciated the narrative. One of the negatives highlighted that there's "not much narrative", which suggests that maybe whilst not much more actual plot could have been explored as it only covers the first two and a half minutes of the film, we could have had more narrative content such as more background to the characters.

Score
On top of the previous questions we also ask viewers to give a score on a 0 to 10 scale, and... every single response was a 7, 8, 9 or 10. From the wording of previous responses this does appear to be on the usual "overall review" scoring system we see in the media where 7 is okay, 8 and 9 are good and 10 is great, so it isn't the most useful thing to analyse - though as a rough judgement we can take that as the mean of the results collected is 8.45 (rounded to 2 d.p.) the general feedback says that the film is generally good.

Whilst these statistics can be useful in regards to making considerations for changes we do have to bear in mind that as we showed the clips to family and people we knew, people may have been going out of their way to be polite as opposed to being critical; therefore I feel we may have to do some more internal critical analysis down the line. This has, however, identified that the primary issues are the camera stability and the overdub quality, which is highly useful to know.

-HM.