3) Audience Feedback Questionnaires - Evaluation - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I decided to do a questionnaire about my film, I decided to release 30 copies of my questionnaire at random for people around school that were 15 and over due to the rating of our film. I then got them to sit through a viewing of our film whilst filling in the questionnaire, on completion of the questionnaire I selected 12 final versions at random to get a variation in results as I felt that analysing 30 questionnaires would be too time consuming when I could get a fair judgement off of 12, and it would be quicker and easier to compare these.

This was the questionnaire I handed to the reviewers.

I thought it was important to know the gender of the people doing the questionnaire as I wanted to determine whether the film was more male or female orientated by seeing whether males or females enjoyed the film more or if a specific gender did not enjoy the film at all. It turned out that there was not a specific mind set for each gender as it showed that among them it was mixed to positive reviews from each, this may have been due to the genre of our film as most people labelled it either a psychological thriller or horror film, this was good as it was not geared towards a specific gender.

I thought it would be beneficial to find out the ages of the people reviewing the film as it would suggest what target audiences think of the film and would also specify an age group for people to benefit from the films experience fully. I found that the older the audience was such as 18 year-olds and some 16 year-olds appreciated the film more than 15 year-olds in particular, this may have been due to the actors all being in their late teens and also a more mature plot line.

I wanted to know what their favourite genre of film was as I would be able to infer what people thought of the film more if they had more of an interest in genres that linked to my film instead of a genre such as comedy, which ironically was the majority of people's favourite genre. As this was the case I was more analytical of the people whose genres interlinked with psychological thriller as I felt that they would be more critical and truthful as they must have seen other psychological thrillers that they could relate our film to.

I also wanted to find out whether the audience even liked watching short films as if they did not, then it was highly probable that they would not enjoy our film and in turn would be more critical of it. Thankfully the majority of people do enjoy short films and this allowed me to get more accurate feedback as it was an audience that had consumed other short films so that ours could be compared and see if it was a realistic and decent production of a short film and if it was conventional.

I also thought it would be beneficial if I knew how often the audience watched a short film, I found that although most people enjoyed short films they would only watch a short film on a one off occasion, perhaps once every few weeks. This did not affect my results however as it was clear that although they did not watch short films all the time, they would still watch them a decent amount so they would know the difference between a good and bad short film.

The majority of people found our short film interesting which implied that it was good a good production, worthy of recognition.

Many people praised the camera work and shots and speaking to people after the film they thought that the camera angles were key in raising suspense and was where the film gained most of it's positive feedback.

Although I feel that the acting could have been better in some parts such as the last scene and the games console scene. Many of the audience felt that the acting was particularly good for two people who have never acted or done drama before.

When people were asked "What did you think of the plot? Did it turn out the way you thought?", they described it as likeable, it was "complex" but that gave people more of a reason to watch it, with "good suspense" creating intrigue and a "twist" at the end.

When asked "Did you find any faults with our film? Where?" a couple of responses gave some positive criticism that was seen as truthful as we felt that some scenes could have been enhanced such as the gaming scene could have had smoother edits.

Finally as the star rating shows, it is clear that the film mainly received 4 stars from audiences, this matches my rating of the film in my film review ancillary task, which suggests that I rated it correctly, however it did also receive a large proportion of 3 star ratings and also a smaller proportion of 5 star ratings, which shows that it did not get a poor rating at any point and the film was well above average.