Audience Feedback- Miss Georgiou

Audience feedback is essential in creating any successful production. It allows us as the producers to produce film that is effective in reaching its desired target audience, which is in our case young teens (13-16 years old). Without audience feedback through focus groups, questionnaires, pre screening etc we would be unable to accurately pick what effects, miss-en-scene, cinematography, setting or music would be the best to use in terms of making our thriller opening as conventional and targeted to our audience as possible. Therefore through the use of audience feedback i am able to identify what would make of thriller successful through communication with our potential audiences.

I was able to get audience feedback on my work through screening it to my peers and group members. From this i was able to get constructive criticism on areas i could change to make it more convention to the thriller genre and therefore achieve a higher mark. An example of this would be when a friend suggested that i should add an effect that would work with the music in order to make the film feel more dynamic. I choose the static effect that can be seen bellow as i would argue that at certain points within my soundtrack it gives a jumpy, unsetting, sinister effect, and is what you would expect to hear in any conventional thriller film. This particular type of audience feedback i found much more helpful as apposed to others such as questionnaire and focus groups as after someone has viewed your work they are able to gain an idea of the context and so potential ideas and effects can be applied more accurately and not just for the sake to make it more conventional but to make it feel much more suspenseful.

The feedback i got would benefit my production as it would be more appropriate to the audience it is being targeted at. If i screen it to my peers, which are consequently my target audience, i will be able to make my film more effectively in reaching and invoking tension and suspense within this certain audience. So for example audience feedback played a huge part in our character development within our production. We consistently received feedback that relatable characters where essential within our film and so we tried our best to do this using age and even costume through the use of the antagonist wearing a tracksuit; a relatable outfit to the youth of today. This feedback was also relatable to many  conventional thriller films such as The last house on the left where a young blonde victim is used to be relatable to its target audience of a similar age range of 14-18.

This feedback is helpful to the film industry in general as it allows them to get an idea of what their audience want or don't want in a film and allow them to see what ideas would be more tailored to the film and its audience. This feedback is also relatively inexpensive all they will need to do is pay for an audience if they don't want to come willingly which would not be much for media conglomerates such as Warner Bros.

We received many positive comments on our setting within our thriller film. Joe Wagh in particular was quoted saying "your setting is really good because it is conventional to the thriller genre". Reflecting on Joe's comment i would argue that he was correct in that are setting is that of a conventional one. The isolated shed in contrast with the modern car park shared both modern and aged thriller conventions to ensure we got a varied share of both to make our film as conventional to the thriller genre as possible.

Another one of my peers; James Barry, gave us positive feedback on my characters saying "they are relatable to your audience". With our target audience being 13-16 years old we took this feedback as positive. Our characters are relatable through their use of costume and age. Our young female victim is relatable through her age of 16 which is the same age of our target audience of 13-16 years old and our antagonist is relatable through the use of costume. His black tracksuit is an outfit that many of the modern youth can relate to today, particularly the males in the audience. This relatablity that our audience feel towards our characters helps to further the audience/character relationship and in turn help increase the tension and suspense on screen.

Another significant positive comment we got on our work was our editing style and techniques used.
Instead of using straight cuts, i instead opted to use alternative options such as the fade and swipe to bring in the clips next shot. The swipe at 0:10 in our clip was one of the edits we received the most positive feedback on and is therefore one of the most relevant examples to use. As you can you in the image bellow the swipe comes in from the right and moves to the left (As the arrow shows). We used this effect in the hopes of replicating the illusion of an antagonist moving in front of the camera, blocking its view. I was right in that this piece of editing make the audience feel uneasy as they are know aware that someone is stalking our victim as Hannah Mahoney supported this saying "the editing at the start is really good, it makes the audience aware someone is watching her".

However we also received some constructive criticism on our work. Our peer, Shaun Mcfarlane said "your camera angles could do with some improving. They don't really change much". Taking on that criticism we looked to include as many different camera angles as possible to make our film much more diverse and using a varied cinematography to include more thriller conventions such as vulnerability using a high angle shot, which we was later able to include within our thriller opening.

The length of our thriller opening was widely criticised through our audience feedback. Being only one minute and two seconds long it we needed an extra 58 seconds of filming to make our opening suitable to meet the task criteria. To achieve this mammoth task he decided to add another setting to film in carrying on from where our first narrative ended.

I have followed the aims of the brief to create my two minute thriller opening by completing and improving my blogs assigned to me by my teacher. In doing this i have gained vital knowledge through research to make my thriller opening as effective as possible in portraying conventional thriller themes and effects.