EVALUATION:How effective was your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback allowed us to build a greater understanding and reckoning of how effective the production pieces for *Playtime* were. As the feedback was mainly positive, this gave us a sense of confidence to know that our planning and effort had been succesful.

However, as most of our feedback came from friends, it was undeniable that there would be a sense of bias when they were critiquing our work. This was true and we faced hardly any criticism.

What would happen when we showed our trailer to other Media Students who have never met us before and so have no guilt in criticising? Our media teacher made this possible by communicating with another teacher from another college and negotiating with them to grade our work using the markscheme as comments from the trailer uploaded on Youtube.

"It seems like the girl has had an isolated existence so even though its difficult inside a house, some long shots would make her loneliness clearer because at the moment we see close-ups and mid range shots, but the zoom to the boy is a very effective shot."
We enjoyed this point as the fact that we were given ideas on how we could have improved our trailer and made our aim more effective was very helpful. The audience feedback allowed us to know that 3rd Party advice although sometimes shunned, can sometimes be a great help.

"Editing: The rapid sequence of words and pictures of the boy makes it clear what the background of the characters and themes of the film would be, but it would be a lot more effective if this was done as camera shots of her past for example, instead of words that could have just been added quickly and easily"

This comment shows that our audience did not know anything about our influences. Perhaps if they had seen that we wanted titles to be a significant aspect to our trailer then they would have understood why we used titles instead of just images. Titles give our future audience brief descriptions to our film, using shots from her past would take away the suspense we wanted to build.

"but the slow motion shots of the girl slow it back down and it loses its pace, so the audience get less excited by the action"

The whole point of the slowing down of our character's movement was infact to build tension. The fact that these audiences thought that this effect actualy removed excitement is arguable. Obviously the pace is slowed down but this was in order for our audience to relax and then be startled by the quick, fast paced shots that soon followed it. The fact that this audience did not get this technique makes us question the effectiveness of this idea.


So, we can see that audience feedback differs from strangers and colleagues. In a sense the feedback from those that we didn't know was more effective as if in actual fact our trailer did go on screens, the viewers too would be strangers and so these comments helped us to argue our thoughts. It is not compulsory for our audience to understand all of our ideas in the way that we deemed them to be understood and it is all based on their interpretation and for this reason, audience feedback was interesting and gave us a real chance to stand up for our trailer.