evaluation question number 3

Audience feedback throughout the whole construction process of our film was very effective and useful.
Feedback was the only way we could get criticism for our film, from another point of view, because we knew our film so well it helped us see things that we maybe didn't see for example whether things worked or if they made sense, because overall the film wasn't for us but made for an audience and their point of view and feedback was vital.
Feedback, affected the ways my group worked from the very first stages of pre-production.

In the process of trying to come up with a story idea we had many difficulties, coming up with Ideas that were achievable, as many of our original ideas where good however were too complex for us to achieve for example, one of my original film ideas was the story of a woman with a personality disorder who has given birth, but is unable to spend anytime with her new born child because she is on watch. From feedback from others as well as members of my group I realised that this Idea would cause many problems, with location as there are many practical issues such as entry problems with filming in hospitals, even if we tried to set up a hospital set ourselves, our production values would be low and the film would not have looked that great. From this my group and I learnt to keep our ideas simple however execute them in an exciting way. This is how my group and I came up with the idea of the story of a cheating woman. This idea was then developed through the use of themes and concepts such as the red strings of fate.
After this we decided that our woman character would be tied to several men, round 5. The feedback given on this was that the amount of men was too much and we were jus complicating things for ourselves. After much thinking we realised that this was true, so we then cut the number of men down to two. Now that we had our main idea down we needed to write a treatment for our story Idea, to pitch to people and get their point of view of the story so far. Our first treatment received a lot of criticism which we took into consideration. Location was one of the issues, in our first pitch the location in where our woman character met up with these men was a little cafe which she took them to every single time. We were told that this location was kind of dull, and very casual for the kind of story we were going for. Character motivation was also quiet unclear, as there was no actual reason for why she is doing so, and if there was it not shown. Our main criticism was that the story was simple however too simple, and needed to be padded out, which meant it needs more elements to make it interesting. While creating our second treatment we kept all our criticisms from the previous one in mind, to overcome the problem of the dullness and simplicity of the story we, decided to have a little twist at the end, which was that our character became pregnant in the end of the story. When we pitched to our class we were praised on the improvement from the previous treatment however this version still needed work. We decided to fix the problem of character motivation, by making her motivation the lack of male attention from a young age as she didn't have a father, this was inspired by the character of Naomi Clark which we researched into. However to show this would mean introducing even more characters which was an issue we previously faced, so we thought that her background would seem clear if we put up pictures of her mother all around her room and mirrors. Feedback about that part was that this did not make sense to the audience, and they would have never pieced the idea of a missing father from those pictures. Also due to the picture of the mother they would expect the story to kind of revolve around her or have her show up, other feedback was that the twist was a good Idea but did not correlate with the kind of relationship she has with these men, as the location of the cafe is very dull and we don't really know that she is actually being sexual with these men. Meaning if we kept this idea we would need to change our location from the cafe to a house, as there is much more we can do in a house. However someone else said the idea of a house is a much better location than a cafe, for the same reasons but, that the idea of the pregancy was a little bit too much, making the story a little bit all over the place.

From this feedback we learnt that we needed to take more time and consideration in the elements of our ideas. This was the feedback which allowed us to come up with a final treatment which was given the approval.
We fixed our problems by having the whole film located in a house, making the character motive simply the want of constant attention, and we got rid of the pregnancy idea in the end as , it was a bit too much, because we didn’t want this film to be too sexually based.

The next step was writing a script, which was a task our group did separately in partneers this was so we could do two different things and pick the best Ideas out from each others work. Most of our feedback came from each other.
We picked out the best bits from each others scripts to then go on and, create our final script for our film. For example in mine and partners script the day dream sequences was, very soft and gentle with her laying with each of the men, with the faces constantly switching to establish that she is with two men. This was picked over the other pair whose idea of the day dream sequence was much more sexual, wit her kissing the mean around the house.

After the scripting process, we created our story boards; we made several drafts of this as because our group was so large everyone had different visions of the script, so we did this until everyone was content. The feedback we received from our script was that it tod the story however the shots were not that interesting, as they were too static. We took this on board and created more visually interesting shots, inspired from previous cinematography tasks, so instead of for example having a shot of woman character standing getting ready this would be shot through her mirror reflection.

For music, one of our team members researched into music he thought would compliment our film, when this was presented the feedback we received was that the acoustic sounds he found were too, smooth and calming, to go with our story, as they are the complete opposites, we were also told that the music was too ‘folky’ and the instruments used did not fit the style or genre of our film. Music which was intense was also however too intense for our film, which although has intense themes, it is not executed in that way. This is the feedback which we took on board and helped us throughout film research; we were then able to find music which fitted the style and genre of our film.
After we had our main preproduction bits ready, the next step was production which went quiet smoothly, thanks to the preparation for it.

During the editing process we received a lot of feedback, every single time we made someone watch our film.
These where mostly technical problems which we either did not notice or things which didn't look that great. For example our first draft of the film, was very simple, we received feedback that there is a fade to black moment during the transition of men during the day dream sequence which needed to be changed to a fade, as it was too abrupt. This is what we did. There was also an effect which was not constant in the daydream sequence which we had to fix and make it so as it did not look good. We originally wanted our abstract shots bleached out however highlighting the colour red, inspired by sin city, however this only worked for one scene as all the other scenes where completely bleached out due to the lighting, in that scene, we still kept it this way however but through feedback we were told it may jus be better to scrap the effect and just leave the abstract shots as they are, as if we did use the effect the image came out black and white ruining the theme of red. Music transition was our main concern in the editing process, as we were constantly told it needed to be a lot smoother. We fixed this problem by modifying sound levels to make the transitions smoother. Feedback was also very useful in the final touches stage of our film, as from this we decided to start off with an abstract shot, which looked so much better than the mundane opening we originally had. So as you can see feedback had been our backbone throughout every single process you can think off, it has allowed for a product which pleases our target audience which is what its all about. As well as helping us overcome and fix problems feedback has also helped us see things in a positive light, our main example of this, was our tittles, as leader of titles research I originally wanted the tittles to follow the theme of the string, so I looked into different ways this could be achieved, like CGI animation or stop motion animation. The stop motion animation was good but did not look too good and would have made our film look less intense than it is and made it look more like the opening sequence of a cartoon, as through my research I found out that this form of text movement is often used in cartoons. so the next option was creating the titles. The problem with this however was that our software had many limitations, which meant we were not able to go with through our idea, so we had to go with the next best thing which looked good. In the beginning we were very upset about this and felt as if the film was a disaster however through feedback we were told that this worked and that our opening title created a sense of mystery, and the theme of romance could be attached to it.

These are all the ways in which feedback has been, helpful and effective during the construction of our film