Rough Cut - Miss Georgiou

Audience feedback is important to production as it allows you to see how your target audience reacts to what you've made and if it's been as effective as you planned. Using feedback you can determine what went well and you can ask the audience for advice on what can be improved.  Without getting feedback before you release your film you may be surprised to find that the audience isn't reacting to the film as you planned and your film may end up subpar. Getting feedback before finishing production helps as the audience can advise you on how you can improve the film.

In order to get some audience feedback we posted a rough cut of our opening sequence onto YouTube. We then got as many people as possible to watch the clip and asked them to tell us what they thought in the comments section. This feedback will benefit us as it allows us to see how effective our opening sequence is and we can use the feedback to make small changes and improvements that suit or target audience.

The first feedback we received was about the soundtrack. We were told it hadn't been incorporated smoothly and that it didn't match what was occurring on screen. When watching our sequence back we noticed that there were times where the music stopped too quickly and other times where it started too loud. Based on the feedback we received we looked at this and realised that not having the soundtrack smoothly match the editing was jarring and would take the audience out of the scene. To rectify this me and Charlie worked on the sequence to make sure the music faded in and out smoother and that it was never too loud. We decided it worked much better if we made sure that the music fades out right before the next shot and also that it slowly increases in volume during the more tense scenes.

Another piece of constructive feedback we received is that our usage of shots and angles was basic and needed more variation. We made use of long shots and close-ups but realised that we hadn't used any shots more conventional to the thriller genre. To fix this we went back out and filmed some extra shots making use of canted angles to portray the antagonists unstable mental state. We also tried to get a high angle shot of the victim but it git dark quickly and when we watched it back we realised it wasn't as good as we had hoped so we left it out.

We also received feedback stating that in some shots the lighting was too dark so it was too hard to make out what was happening. We struggled during filming to get everything filmed while the lighting was sufficient so t rectify this problem we used Final Cut Pro to increase the brightness in some scenes and make sure that the lighting was consistent throughout the shots.

Some positive feedback we received was that even if it hadn't been incorporated well the actual music we had chosen suited our sequence and helped create tension. Another positive comment we got was about the credits that Jess had designed. We were told the style of the credits was well suited to our film and was very conventional to the genre as it was white text on a black background and it was styled to represent the dysfunctional nature of the antagonist. We also received positive feedback about how the start of the sequence was very conventional and did a good job of slowly building tension leading up to victim finally seeing the antagonist.