Evaluation: Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

a) How did you respond to the original brief with the audience in mind?

The original brief was to produce a 5 minute film with a beginning, middle and end. When given the original brief we responded by giving several other students around college a copy of our storyline to read, we then asked them some questions in order to get their opinion on it. We asked them:

Our questionnaire

• How old are you?
• Do you enjoy watching horror films?
• What is your favourite horror film?
• What elements of horror scare you?
• Would you be interested in watching our short film?
• What do you like about our idea?
• What do you not like about our idea?
• How would you improve/develop it?

We filmed 5 of the students responses so that we could use them later on to develop our idea according to the feedback. By asking about their age and opinions on the horror genre we were able to find out whether students would be the target audience for our film. 2 of the 5 students asked said that they were scared by serial killers which is similar to the character of Ben in our film, this encouraged us to keep this aspect of our film. All of the students said that they would be interested in watching our short film and 3 of them said that they wouldn't change anything which helped us to make a decision on the final storyline. However one of the respondents suggested that we should show some of the deaths rather than implying them which we took into consideration but decided against it as we concluded that it would be very difficult to create the appearance of blood and gore needed to make the deaths look authentic.

In filming and editing how did you ensure meaning would be apparent to the audience? What creative decisions did you make in planning, rehearsing, filming and editing that were influenced by your sense of the audience and how they might interpret your finished film?

Whilst planning and filming we kept in mind the certificate of our film which is a 12 so that we could plan the scenes to meet the guidelines, for example we decided to not show the deaths of each of the characters as the bbfc says that a 12 film can contain moderate physical and psychological threat but not sustained sequences, by not including gore and only having implied threat keeps the certificate at a 12 which allows our film to then reach a wider audience.

Whilst filming we constantly kept in mind how the audience would read the meanings of each scene and read the mise en scene of each shot. 
Part of the mise en scene that we controlled in order to send a message to the audience was the costumes of each character. We dressed Becky in more mature clothing which represented her as being the protective, motherly character as she is the one that leads the two girls when looking for Charlie. We dressed Alex in girly clothes that show her 

We placed these shots of Ben crossing out the victims faces just after he had killed them to show that he had killed them without having to show their deaths and to clarify this to the audience.  

We had the audience in mind when we decided to use the close-ups of the door handle when Ben is trying to open the door to emphasise, along with the music, the suspense of not knowing whether he is going to get in or not. 

Similar shot in Pretty Little Liars

This is similarly used in Pretty Little Liars to create suspense.

We put the Bad TV video filter over the transitions from one hand held shot to another which also clarified that the characters are using a hand held camera and showed the audience that time had passed between shots. We also used the fade in fade out transition between some shots to show that time had passed and so to ensure that the film made sense.

During editing we realised that part of the film wasn't clear to the audience and that they may not understand that the character of Ben who the girls are talking about in the car has been stalking the girls and is the one who kills them in the end. As a result of this we decided to film an extra flashback scene and a few shots of Ben looking at pictures of the girls that he has take, these shots helped to clarify the storyline for the audience.

These are two of the extra shots that we added:

When viewing the film from an audience's point of view we also found that it wasn't clear which of the shots were filmed from Alex's hand held camera so we put an overlay on the shots which imitated the screen of a hand held camera. Examples of shots that have the overlay:

We uploaded a rough cut of our film to YouTube and created a questionnaire linked to the video. We had 5 responses which were positive as most of the respondents said that they enjoyed watching the rough cut and understood it. We did receive some feedback as to how we could improve our film such as the suggestion that we 'could have had one of the characters survive at the end' as some of the audience felt disappointed that Alex didn't defeat the villain which is expected in the teen horror genre. A few people also said that they thought the sequence between the girls watching the film and finding that Charlie has disappeared was too quick and that there wasn't enough emphasis on Charlie's death. 

As part of the questionnaire we asked the audience whether they thought the sound including the sound effects and the music was suitable and used in appropriate parts of the film. All of the respondents agreed that the sound was suitable and some commented that it was the sound that made parts of the film scary. As this was just a rough cut we were able to change parts of the film according to the feedback.

All of the respondents interpreted the film in the right way and understood the narrative. The only possible difference that there could be in how the film is understood is by a younger audience who may not understand that Ben is the person who has stalked them and is mentioned in the car and then goes on to kill them.

Rough cut: