Audience Feedback

For our audience feedback we decided to use the social networking site Facebook and questionnaires to find out what we could improve upon and see how our target audience were reacting to our products. We decided to use Facebook as we felt it was a quick and easy way to reach our target audience of 16-24 year olds. We then decided to create a questionnaire so that we could ask a range of 16-24 year olds to look at our products and then gives us feedback accordingly.

Facebook feedback

From our Facebook feedback we found that the voice over was a bit too serious and took away romantic comedy element of the teaser trailer. However we decided to keep the voice over as it was as we wanted a male British voice over to attract our dominantly British audience and we didn't want to lose the Romantic side of the teaser trailer to the comedy. Other feedback we got was to elongate the scene which has our film name on it to give it more impact and give our audience more of a chance to take it in. We have taken this advice on board as after we watched it we felt it would benefit our audience. The other main criticism that came out of our Facebook feedback was the shaky camera to begin with. However we decided to keep this feature in so it looked more like a "home video" and appealed to our target audience.

   

Questionnaire feedback

We asked the following questions to nine people within our target audience age range of 16-24 year olds:

1. How old are you?
2. Do you feel all 3 products suggest the romantic comedy genre?
3. Are the images on the magazine and poster appropriate for our film?
4. Do you feel the font works on each of these products?
5. Does the colour scheme of orange and pink suggest the rom-com genre?
6. Would you go and see the film after seeing these three products?
7. Which product do you feel appeals to you most?
8. Are there any improvements you would suggest?

For questions 1-6 we found we had the same answers on each of the questionnaires, this was that all of the products served their purpose and the products had made people want to go and see the film.

Question 7 gave us a variety of answers as this was mainly down to personal preference, however it is clear from the pie chart below that the teaser trailer was more appealing than the other two products to our target audience.

                                                                                           

For question 8 we also got a variety of responses mainly due to the fact it was and open ended question meaning no options were available for people to fill out, because of this we were unable to show the response in a chart format but the feedback we gained was as follows: 

• Needed a wider variety of shots
• There wasn't enough emphasis on the prejudice of the male protagonist and it was difficult to understand why he was imperfect 

The under emphasis on the male protagonist imperfection was a concern of ours however we decided that it would have been difficult to portray he was not imperfect to her but her parents in a teaser trailer which have the average time of under a minute.We did consider including a scene which could imply this but after discussion came to the conclusion that the "mystery" of why he is imperfect could be a reason as to why people go and watch the film.

We are generally pleased with our audience feedback as much as it was positive or helpful to us in making our film of a higher standard. There were also small comments which we were able to justify our reasoning for rather than physically changing. We are pleased with all three products overall and are glad that each product serves its purpose.  

Skills developed from AS to A2

From AS to A2 we have a acquired many skills and used a variety of new technologies and techniques to help us make our final products. At the beginning of our film we have close ups of supposedly "imperfect" guys. Last year I feel we may have used a mid-shot rather than a close up as this would have been easier to centralise the actors however at A2 we felt more comfortable to do this and understood that if the actors were off centre in the shot we would be able to fix this by editing rather than re-filming.

Also we were very conscious of continuity this year. Although last year we acknowledged continuity and its importance there were still parts of our work where there were slight continuity errors for example, where we had filmed on different days the lighting was slightly different in some scenes. Knowing this made us more conscious of it this year and we made sure that our actor and actress had a variety of clothes and different styles in each shot to show that it was different day. Also we tried to get as much filming done in one day so that the lighting or weather wasn't a problem.

At A2 we have played around a lot with the writing fonts for our teaser trailer, magazine and poster. At AS we were set on a font for our film opening and never really looked around to see if a different one would have worked better. Therefore this year we researched this in more detail and looked at what was typical for a Rom-Com and what would appeal most to our target audience before deciding on a definite font for our products.  

Our familiarity with the editing software Pinnacle also helped us a lot this year. At AS a small problem with the filming could sometimes cause us big problems when we were trying to edit and make our product the best it could be. However this year we found that we could resolve small filming issues on our own and quickly as we had learnt them from AS. Subsequently at AS when we found something wrong with our filming we were very quick to just go and re-film to try and resolve the problem rather than try and work with it on Pinnacle and see if we could resolve it through the editing devices available to us. Whereas this year we were more confident in exploring the software and trying to find solutions to our filming problems that way. Also by exploring the program we were able to find devices that would improve our film and give it variety.

Use of new media technology in the research and planning stages

Media technology is advancing at a rapid rate and it is important that we keep up to date with these products to make our promotional package look as contemporary as possible. Also the more contemporary it looks the more appealing it becomes to our target audience of 16-24 year olds as they are the dominant users of these advancing technologies.During the research and planning stages we have used a range of new media technology including:

• Edirol- We used this to record the voice over for our film. We found this useful as it is small and portable so we were able to use it wherever we wished. Our only problem was that to listen to our recording back we needed headphones or someone where we could plug in a USB cable meaning we had to record many times to ensure we got our voice over how we wanted it.
• Laptop- Used to edit teaser trailer and create film poster and magazine. The laptop was easy for us to edit on and like the edirol it was portable so we were able to work in our own time on our editing.
• Video camera- Used to film our teaser trailer. As we had used these video cameras for our AS work we were familiar with how they worked which made the process easier for us.
• Flip camera- Used this to film our storyboard animatics as it is easier to steadily hold these to film a smaller space. As the flip camera has the USB attached to it we were able to take videos very quickly and then upload them quickly too.
• Still camera- Used to take pictures for our film poster and magazine as well as some shots from filming to show our progress.
• Pinnacle Studios- Used to edit our teaser trailer. As we used Pinnacle to edit our AS coursework we were quite familiar with the program. However this year we took more time to explore the range of editing tools that were available to us and were able to use them to better effect.
• Photoshop- Used to edit our images for our film poster and magazine. We found photoshop was the best software to edit our pictures and it was a software that as a group we were quite familiar with so were able to get the best results.
• Excel- Used to create a questionnaire and then graphs about audience research to help us understand what our target audience want.
• YouTube- Used as research for our teaser trailers. YouTube is a quick way to find videos and teaser trailers to help us with our research and understanding of what goes into a teaser trailer. 
• Facebook- Used to get audience feedback on our teaser trailer. We decided to use Facebook as a way to get audience feedback as we felt it was an easy way to access our target audience. It was also a very quick way to get feedback on our teaser trailer.

Media Theories

Generally the media base their narratives around contemporary world issues. For example when war is prominent in the news many films about war come out in the cinema e.g The Hurt Locker and Dear John. This also links with our post modern society. Post modern society revolves highly around a "must have" consumerist concept, this is the idea that we want everything and we want it as quickly as possible and this idea is commonly reflected in many romantic comedies such as "Confessions of a Shopaholic" where the protagonist spends and spends her money and this stops her achieving what she wants in life.

Feminism is most definitely a theory that can be linked to our film as our main character is female and she doesn't want to settle for any less than perfect. However she does want a relationship and marriage that are typically seen as traditional values in today's society. Therefore our narrative and teaser trailer probably link more the liberal feminist ideology compared to the radical feminists.

The message we tried to portray in our film was that everyones idea of "perfection" is different and what you think may be perfect for you could be wrong, this is also known as the hypodermic syringe theory where by messages are immediately are passed to the audience through various media forms. As we based much of our narrative around our tag line "love makes the imperfect perfect" it was easy to try and suggest this idea of different people have different perceptions of perfection to our audience. To see whether we had successfully passed this message to our audience we asked them complete a questionnaire after seeing our products which asked a range of questions which when answered would help us to see if what we had actually intended to portray had been successfully taken in by our target audience.

Editing

During the editing process we have encountered a few problems but none that we haven’t been able to resolve. Once we had uploaded our film to Pinnacle we realised that some had been filmed in HD and others hadn’t which meant that there was two black strips either side of the shot on the scenes which hadn’t been filmed in HD. To resolve this we just had to change the settings on Pinnacle by right clicking and selecting fit to screen, this removed the black strips and all of the shots then looked the same.

We also cut out a whole scene we had filmed of our main female character and her friend as we felt that the dialogue included in that shot was unconventional of teaser trailers and that it didn’t fit with the rest of our teaser trailer.

The colour of the fonts on our teaser trailer also caused us some problems as we didn’t know whether to use to separate colours of pink and orange for the fonts or whether to use one block colour so it didn’t look confusing to our audience. After changing it in a variety of ways to see which is best we decided to use two colours as it links to our magazine front cover and film poster.

After we had finished the majority of our editing we watched our teaser trailer through and found that some of the shots were off centre. Rather than just re-filming we adjusted the shots on Pinnacle by zooming in a little bit closer and moving them to ensure they were on centre.

We had to change the image on our magazine front cover as after audience feedback they felt it was too posed for a magazine front cover. As it was our lead female character we had on the front of the magazine we decided to make her look more in character and add a background to imply the idea of fun and youth which is typical for a romantic comedy.

On our film poster we have used an image of our two lead characters on a bench. During the editing process we noticed that on one side the edge of the bench had been slightly cut off and we were unable to get it back. To resolve this we cropped the picture so the other side of the bench was slightly cut off so that the image then looked symmetrical.

Although we have experienced a few problems we were much more at ease with Pinnacle compared to AS at experienced fewer problems with the program this year. However we experienced editing problems regarding images and fonts on our magazine front cover and film poster as this was new to us.

Title and font analysis

For our titles we haven’t kept the same fonts throughout all three of our products as we felt that as they are all different Medias that certain fonts may work on one but may not work on the others. Despite the use of different fonts we have always kept the tag line, “love makes the imperfect perfect” in italics as we believe that this connotes the idea of love and romance. On the magazine front cover we used a variety of fonts as this is typical of magazine front covers. We tended to put cover lines or singular words that we thought would grab our audience’s attention in a bolder or bigger font so that they would pick up the magazine and buy it. On both the film poster and teaser trailer we used a large bold easily readable font for the film name so it would stand out and people would remember it when the film come out at a later date.

Evaluation of filming

We filmed our teaser trailer in stages mainly because we were reliant on other people and this meant we had to work with them and when they were available to film. Firstly we filmed a few shots of the boys we have at the beginning of our teaser trailer as they were quick and easy for us to find and film. We then filmed the scenes with our main female character in as she is played by a member of our group. We also filmed a scene between our main female character and her friend to try and explain our narrative to the audience, however when we actually put it into the teaser trailer we felt it didn’t work in the way we wanted it to. Also when we referred back to our teaser trailer research we found that there is not very often any dialogue or explanation of the narrative, this is more conventional of an actual trailer compared to a teaser trailer.  Later on that week our main male character was available to film so we were able to go to the locations where we wished to film the scenes between the two of them. Although we filmed all of the scenes of them together on one day they had a change of clothes so we were able to make our film look more realistic and as if it had been filmed over several days or weeks. Once we had uploaded all the footage to the laptop we found that we didn’t have enough shots of different boys at the beginning of the teaser trailer so we had to go out and film some more to get our idea across.

For our film we have kept a lot of the conventions of a ROM-COM within a modern society. For example our female character is independent and won’t just settle for anything despite wanting a traditional relationship. We also kept our main characters young and good looking as this is what is generally seen in a ROM-COM and it is what audiences expect. Another convention is that of a voice over in the teaser trailer which is expected in ROM-COM teaser trailers more than any other genre. The music in the background of the teaser trailer is another way of maintaining the ROM-COM conventions. Typically pop music or upbeat music is used as background music to suggest the fun and happy narrative that is linked to romantic comedies and we have used such music so our audience automatically know the genre of our film.

Final film poster

This is our final film poster. It doesn't differ greatly from our initial film poster idea but we did make a few changes. We decided to move the title underneath the image rather than having it on the bench next to our stars as it would have looked squashed and not easily readable. Also we felt it would stand out and grab the audience's attention more if it was on its own underneath the image. 

We kept with our colour scheme of orange and pink so that people can easily link all three of our items together and because these are typical colours for a ROM-COM. Another typical ROM-COM poster convention is the white background and we decided to keep this to make our writing and image stand out.We also made the conscious decision to have both our stars wearing pink and white so that the poster fitted together well and nothing clashed. For our image we decided to have them sitting on the bench looking at each other to suggest the ROM-COM genre and imply a little bit about our narrative.

After looking at our billing block font we decided to change this slightly from the original as beforehand it was very clear and a dominant part of our poster and after looking into this a bit more we found that generally billing blocks were almost unreadable. Therefore we changed the font to a slimmer and smaller font to fit in better. We also re sized our production company images as we felt they were too over powering on the poster.

Overall there is not a huge amount of writing on the poster and we decided this is best as in our audience research we found that our target audience of 16-24 year olds initially look for the image, stars names and date of release.