What have you learned from your
audience feedback?
During the planning stage, once we decided our genre for our 5 minute film would be thriller we then had to establish who our
target audience would be. Typically thriller films attract males more than females however we decided to try and target both
female and male by using the protagonist. We gave her a possible love interest which would grab the attention of the females
and the potential violence would entertain the males. We also wanted the film to be educational for teenagers who are not fully
aware of how dangerous online chat is as they believe it just happens in movies.
The age certificate at first was going to be a 15 but once researching other
thriller films with similar plots we decided our film would be better as a 12A.
Once we had wrote a detailed plot we wanted audience feedback as the audience plays a huge part in how successful the film
is. We found this in two ways, one by sending out an online questionnaire and the other by walking round college interviewing a
mixture of people, recording their feedback by filming on a Sony HDV camera. We wanted to find out what they thought would
improve our film, most of the feedback said they liked the idea of our plot so we didn't have much to improve on. However we
did find that most of the feedback was from females so we believed our film would be watched by more girls then boys. Only a
few out of all the responses said that the films age certificate was higher than a 12A which was pleasing for us as the production
team as it was obvious to them who the film is for.
During filming to make it easier to understand, we made a conscious effort to make it appear like Ethan, the villian
has done this before so we filmed him deleting someone before Hollie allowing the film to do a loop as at the end
he deletes Hollie and goes on to add another girl.
Once we had finished our rough edit we sent out another questionnaire with
the film attached and asked for their feedback. We had mixed opinions on the
age certificate between 12A and 15 which is understandable as they are hard
to differentiate. The positive feedback received was that they liked the
message of the story which was very good to hear as we were aiming to get a
message across that the internet can be a dangerous place.
The audience feedback at the beginning picked up on some sound problems that as a group we didn't notice so the
questionnaire helped us change our film to make it better and run smoothly. The overall responses were very positive
showing we were successful in entertaining our target audience.