To get an understanding of my short films audience I decided to create a questionnaire on Google Forms and I posted it to about 20 people. Not all of these people were able to complete my questionnaire in the time frame I had available so I decided to screenshot what responses I had at the time and split them into individual questions in order for me to better breakdown what I learnt from them. To successful talk about how each piece of audience feedback helped me I've decided to split this post into two parts. These parts are my regular audience feedback for my main task and my professional feedback for my main task with a short Prezi embedded at the end to show my conclusion.
Audience Feedback Results - Short Film:
I asked this question because I wanted to see if I was right in thinking that the male section of the market would enjoy my short film more than the female so asking this question allowed me to see this in a practical way. As you can see 86.7% of my audience members in fact turned out to be male ensuring my assumption to be right. This meant that I was on target for successfully understanding how to market a film towards a certain audience correctly. However, I am surprised more females didn't watch my short film, or at least take this questionnaire. It might have been down to the fact I wasn't able to cater to a females comedy desires so next time before planning to create a short film I will research into what women find funny in order to please their side of the demographic more as they make up just a high percentage of the population as men do so they are important for a film to succeed.
For this question I received data I was expecting. This is because I stated early on my target demographic for this short film was going to aimed toward the 15-20 years old section of the market and a combined total of 93.8% of viewers turned out to be these age groups. This means that I have successfully catered my film towards the age segment I wanted to meaning that I can be happy in the fact people my age are just as interested in watching my short film as I am making it.
I decided to ask this question as it has allowed me to see whether my film was successful with the gender and age demographics I intended it for. As you can see 75% of people loved my short film whilst 25% of people liked it. I was surprised these figures were so high and that I didn't receive any negative responses either. This means I have successfully created a short film that is funny enough to please my target audience making me confident on that if I were to release this short in a real life context in cinema I could expect it to me a moderate success at least.
This was an important question for me to ask as it allowed me to see what I had done right in the eyes of my target audience. As you can see most of them loved different aspects of the film which wasn't a surprise to me as film is very subjective. However, I want to try and breakdown why I believe their response is the way it was. The characters/narrator was named by multiple people, I think this was because people could relate to the characters as there were a number of people they could try and identify with. This and the way they were perfomed by my fantastic group of actors is why I think people felt as if they were the best part of the film. A number of people also named the humour as their favourite part. I think this was because I was able to consult Joshua, my partner on this project and my cast to help me write the dialogue for the film. Having the input of seven other people meant I was able to create a script that combined all of our opinions to create the funniest and highest quality we could for what we wanted to do. Finally, the other most common aspect people enjoyed was the way the short film was shot. I put this down to me and Joshua planning ahead and being able to storyboard our short film before we started filming as this meant when it came to shooting the film we had so much extra time we could retake shots and create new ones. This meant we were able to have much more to work with when it came to editing and as you can see it paid off as a lot of my audience members enjoyed this most about my final product, The Room.
For these next two questions I asked them "Who Was Your Favourite Character?" and why this was the case to see who the overall favourites were so I was able to see which was they most popular and why. From doing this I was able to see what made certain character funnier than others.
As you can see the clear winner was David's character with 43.8% of people naming his to be the best. The reasons given for this were his reliability, his acting skills and his humorous fight scene with Lawrence. I believe these reasons were mainly given as David is the first face we see on screen so we automatically try and create a bond with his character as an audience member so we can become invested in the short film as we want to see what happens with him. These questions allowed me to learn what makes a character successful in my target audiences mind. This was a helpful question for me to ask as it meant I can use this information I have obtained and apply it to my future productions with the knowledge I could create more loveable characters for my audience so I could produce a better film overall.
I wanted to ask this question so I could get some quantitative figures about my short film. As you can see the lowest score I received from the audience was a seven out of ten. I still believe this is a huge confident boost as most people would say they strongly liked it or thought it was even better than that. This was a good question for me to ask as it meant I was able to take these scores and find the mean which turned out to be an average score of 7.8/10. This was a much higher score than I thought I would receive as it meant in a real life context my film would be a huge success with audiences loving it, in the case of my target market. This question helped me reassure what I had created was a worthwhile production that directly played to my audiences desires.
Every response I received were helpful in informing me where I had gone wrong when it came to making my film. The main pieces of feedback I got were comments about how I should have stayed in the room longer and shown a scene in which the characters reveal their secrets. Upon reflection I believe that most of these comments were correct and that the person that said "Some clips felt too long, car sequence went on for too long I thought" was the most interesting comment as I thought that was a funny scene. This told me that I still had a long way to go to fully understand my target audiences desires for a short film. However, I am still pleased with how my production turned out because most of these comments are small editing complaints or telling me what else I could include rather than saying certain aspects of my film were why they made it bad. If anything it was the audience wanted more out of my short film and I found this to be good feedback as it meant what I had produced was still entertaining.
Finally, I asked whether the viewer would recommend my short film to other people and the majority response was yes with it getting 68.8% of the votes. This result made me very happy as it meant I had made a short film people would be happy use their own time to introduce others to it. This ultimately told me that my film was a success as it allowed me to find out that people would spread a positive word of mouth about my film and as this is the best way a film can be marketed I am very happy with these results.
Professional Feedback Results - Short Film:
I'm only going to breakdown two answers I received from my professional as these are the only important aspects to their response in my opinion. These are the answers to the "How Could I Improve My Short Film" and "What Did You Enjoy About My Short Film" questions as they show the real difference of opinions compared to my regular audience.
Overall, what I've learnt from my regular and professional audience feedback questionnaires is that to cater my film towards more types of audience members I will next time need to have a clearer understanding of what women find funny so I can let them have more enjoyment from my short film. Another aspects I'd need to adapt is that I should consider spending more time writing the script to allow the quality of my dialogue to improve to a higher level so older people can appreciate to humour more. Since David was named the overall favourite character I am also led to believe that to produce a better sort film I need to give my characters more screen time as well as giving them more to do once on screen. This is because people seem to appreciate the amount David did in the film so I'd want to replicate this with other characters to let people have a better experience watching my film. If I were able to make all these changes I strongly believe that my final product could have been funnier, pleased more types of people and therefore more popular.
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