Audience feedback - Miss Georgiou

Audience feedback is important to a production as it enables the producers to get an idea of what message is coming across to their audience and allows them to gain some positive and negative comments on the film so they can improve it. 

In order to improve our thriller opening sequence, my group and I wanted to get some feedback so that we could improve our thriller. We got this feedback by showing a small group of people, between the ages of 15 to 18 which is our target audience. We then asked them a short questionnaire, consisting of questions like 

• 'What was your first impression of our thriller sequence?'
• 'How did it make you feel?'
• 'Do you feel it was conventional to the thriller genre? If so how?'
• 'Is there anything you would change to make our thriller better?'

The feedback we gained would benefit our production of the thriller as we are now able to go back and improve certain elements to make it even better, potentially allowing us to get a better mark. However, if this was a real film produced in the industry, the audience feedback would also allow the film's production team to review certain parts of the film to make them better. These changes could potentially make the film more successful by making more money as it could appeal to a larger range of people. 

Some positive feedback my group received was:

1. We included a wide variety of cinematography which made the sequence interesting and effective. - I agree with this comment as this was something we tried to do. We wanted to show a range of shots but made sure they were consistently conventional. For example, we always used a high angled shot looking down at the little girl to portray her as the victim, (See below). 

     2. The idea and use of the underwater scene was unique and made it stand out compared to other thriller          opening sequences. - This comment also sums up another one of our aims as we had this underwater            scene idea right from the start. We wanted our thriller film to be different but by still being conventional.          Also we noticed that there wasn't a lot of other thriller films who have an underwater scene and so                thought if carried out correctly this would make our narrative really successful. 

     3. We were also told that our opening sequence was very conventional to the thriller genre, such as the              use of low key lighting, the characters of the protagonist and unknown antagonist, as well as the choice          of tension building music. - We wanted to try and make our opening sequence very conventional and            so did this through the examples listed above as well as many more. We also made the music match              the images and edits on the screen, so that it would build suspense and be even more effective. 

Some negative feedback my group received was;

1. The narrative was very confusing and some of my audience didn't understand it. - I think that by planning, researching and re-editing the film so many times, we understood the narrative and so assumed that our audience would too. 
2. They said that whilst our credits were good, they could be improved by making them look more conventional and more suited to the narrative of the little girl. 
3. The idea of the flashbacks was good, but we needed to make this clearer and easier to understand. 

To improve these points my group did the following:

• Whilst our narrative was confusing to viewers, my group and I were not too worried about this as this is what we were trying to do. By confusing your audience you make them vulnerable to feeling many different sorts of emotions, such as them feeling nervous or anxious to what is to happen next. This will allow the climax and ending of the opening sequence to have a bigger effect on the audience, and this is what we were trying to do. However, saying this, we did re-watch our thriller and got a second opinion and decided to take out a few of the shots in an attempt to make the narrative easier to understand. 
• We decided to follow the feedback about the credits and changed the style of our credits. We decided that as the narrative was about the little girl, the credits should look like a child wrote them, perhaps the little girl herself. We therefore chose a more childlike font style which gave the credits a more sinister feel and helped to build suspense, (See below). 

• We also decided to make the flashbacks clearer by changing the lighting to a brighter high-key light, as well as adding in the transition of a fade to emphasise the change in time, (See below an example of a fade). 
  

Overall, we followed the aims of the brief my creating a 2 minute opening sequence to a thriller. We kept to the time frame and also included many thriller conventions such as low key lighting, setting in a forest and tension building music etc to make our sequence as conventional as possible. We kept to the time frame by carefully planning and researching everything from mise-en-scene to character representations, as well as having a film schedule and time log sheets to ensure our progression each week. We stuck to the brief and have made a good thriller opening sequence that our target audience can relate to.