Evaluation Activity: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

An incredibly useful resource in creating any creative piece is the constructive criticism from others. When I had finished my Soap Trailer around Christmas 2011, I thought it was done well and could not be improved much more. However as always, whenever someone makes something, they are likely to be biased towards the work, either consciously or subconsciously.
Therefore the audience feedback session from an audience of year 12 Media Students was necessary to highlight any problems that were present in our media films.
Below is my first draft of my Media film, completed and uploaded to the internet on the fourth of January:

We then had to construct a questionnaire that highlighted any potential problems, and also asked general questions such as whether or not the trailer suited the Soap Genre.

My questionnaire asked 10 questions and was answered by 14 groups:

1. After viewing this trailer, would you say it suits the Soap genre?

2. Would you watch the Soap after viewing this trailer?

3. Is the music appropriate for the trailer/genre?

4. Should there be text to accompany the voiceovers?

5. Is the trailer the right length?

6. Are there enough conventional characters for a Soap?

7. Is there a variety of shots?

8. Is there anything that can be improved?

9. What works well?

10. Is the editing appropriate (lighting, transitions etc.)?

Once the questionnaire was distributed to the AS level class, whom were organised into various groups of fourteen, I learned that my movie was relatively well received by them, with many students complementing the choice of music over many other things.

However, through close analysis of the questionnaires, I learned that although the vast majority of people who viewed the trailer suggested adding text over the voiceover work. This was a good idea, although in the end I decided it would not help the trailer, as the text already added at the introduction to character segments did enough to establish the characters, and adding additional text to the voiceovers too would make the trailer far too cluttered.
I know this as I tried adding voice over texts when I was editing for the first time, and although it would have added more to establish characters, it did indeed make the advert far too cluttered. It also ended up revealing too much about the characters, whereas the text I have in the soap already reveals a small amount of back story through one and two word phrases, but left a majority to a mystery, thereby enticing the customers to watch the show to learn more. An effective use in marketing.

Another suggestion from my questionnaire's feedback is that the song we used was inappropriate. Although I disagree, I can see to an extent why it may not be conventional for a Soap. However, I was unable to change the music by this point because I had timed it to work with the cues on film, and also because although it is unconventional, that was also our objective; to market a show that follows conventions but is also it's own product in order to add something fresh and new to this genre. Therefore, I decided that ultimately, there was not enough people raising an issue with the music (with one of the criticisms saying yes and no) to justify considering changing it around and choosing another song to fit the mood and the film itself.

However, one complaint I learned from the questionnaire that I decided I did think was worth changing, was the point raised by group 6, in that the trailer was too long. This was also raised by group 14, suggesting we make our shots shorter.
Although not many people raised this issue, on hindsight, it was a glaringly obvious one, as the trailer ran for 1:46, which is astonishingly long for a trailer. Therefore, I decided that it was worth going through the trailer and cutting out shots where nothing happens, or shots that simply ran too long.
The end result was a significantly shorter trailer, which actually in my opinion, runs much more fluently than the first draft.

In this version of the film, numerous shots were shortened by around a second, to a few seconds at a time. This made the trailer seem much faster paced. I also used this opportunity to change the song arrangement, as the original version of the song was cut off in the middle and rearranged to start over. Although I made many, many attempts to smooth the transition as much as possible, it was incredibly noticeable and so I changed it to play normally.

However, I didn't just learn criticism from the audience feedback, a large percentage of my feedback results came back positive with many compliments such as good characters and shots, multiple comments about the choice of music being good, the text and voice overs, and one group even said I had the best editing.

Overall, just the same as last year, this questionnaire feedback has been invaluable in our coursework editing process, as it pointed out many good things and bad things about our trailer, which gave us a unique and in depth view from many others' observations, and it gave me much more of an insight in what to change and what to keep in my media trailer in order to improve it. The end result, I believe, was a stronger, better and much more fluent trailer which I think is more likely to look like it belongs on TV than the first draft, and so to the year 12s who have given us this information, I would like to thank you for your participation.

Below are the final results from the questionnaires that were returned to us:
Green (Positive)

Yellow (Criticism)

Black (No Response)