Audience Feedback on our '1st Cut' Screening

We gathered a group of young people, mixed gendered, to view the first cut of our trailer. The reaction we got was really positive and everyone seemed to completely understand our concept. We handed out a questionnaire to the audience members, giving them to a chance to give any positive or negative feedback. The questions read:

1) Would you watch this film?

2) what did you like?

3) what would you change?

4) did you understand the story?

The majority of answers were very positive, and many said that they wouldn't change a thing about our initial cut! There was some constructive feedback though, which I will explore here.

In this questionnaire, the individual enjoyed the voice over and thought that our use of dark lighting was effective. However, they were not keen on the shot of our actress rubbing lipstick onto the mirror. The shot is largely symbolic of our main characters anger at herself, signified by the combination of red lipstick (signifying anger) and the mirror (a symbol of self reflection). We will take this, and the individuals opinion into account as we edit further.

 

This person really liked our use of 'found footage' at the opening of our trailer, where we used clips from vloggers on youtube to tell the audience that our film is about the internet. There is one part in our initial cut where we displayed a view count rising and rising from '5,000 memebers' to around '5,500 members', which caused some confusion here. We thought that this may happen, but we still used the shot for our initial cut, with the aim of replacing it anyway when we had more time to edit. We want to replace it with a shot of a 'view count' rather than a 'members count', as our audience will be more familiar with this due to youtube and so on.

Another individual felt that the scene where our actress bangs her hands against the wall in anger did not fit well. We will take this advice into consideration as we edit further, but we will keep in mind that nobody else picked up on this and so we assume that the rest of the audience liked it. 

Here are some examples of questionnaires which contained only positive feedback. Our audience seemed to really like our storyline, our use of music, and our voiceover, which are all things that we anticipated they would enjoy.

Overall, we were very pleased with the way that our audience perceived our initial cut of our trailer.
Despite our '1st cut' success, we want to keep improving our trailer, including more footage, improving the pace, and improving the flow of the music.

Survey and 1st cut screening by Emili Hone, Alexandra Gibson, Alex Nicholas and Melissa Owen.

post by Emili Hone