Evaluation Q1 - In what ways did your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real life media products?

Evaluation Q2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Q3 - What have you learnt from audience feedback?

By gathering audience feedback I was able to see what our target audience of 15-35 year olds thought of our short film and their opinions on what they thought worked well, as well as what they think could have been improved in order to make the overall final product more successful.

Before creating our short film I had created a pre questionnaire consisting of 15 questions which was then completed by ten individuals from our target audience. This allowed us to develop an understanding of what they would expect and like to see in our production, ‘Big Boy’. After completing our production, as part of my paperwork I then created a post-questionnaire for individuals to complete after watching our final production which allowed us to gain feedback on the positive and negative aspects of our short film, as well as improvements that could be made. I then embedded the survey onto our group blog which made it very easy and convenient for individuals to complete it. After collecting ten responses I then gathered the results from the survey and analysed them. Below is the post questionnaire I had created and the results I had analysed:

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Post Questionnaire Graphs by shaniamedia

Social Media

As well as creating a post-questionnaire we were also able to use web 2.0 to promote our short film and collect audience feedback through the use of social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

YouTube

As a group we chose to distribute our final product, ‘Big Boy’ onto YouTube as we were very familiar with this website and knew that our target audience commonly use this social media website, meaning they would easily be able to view our product and provide us with feedback. In addition to this, we chose to use this website due to the features it provides. For example, our viewers are able to ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ the video which would allow us to see how many people enjoyed our short film, as well as how many people disliked our short film. After analysing our responses, I successfully found that we had received a larger amount of thumbs up’s than thumbs down’s. Also, YouTube provides a feature where we are able to see a viewer count which enables us to see how many views our production has received. Lastly, the comment feature allows audience members to leave written feedback on their opinions about our production which is the most beneficial features as they are able to be very specific and explain what they liked and disliked, as well as what could be improved, compared to just giving the video a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Facebook and Twitter

We also decided to create a Facebook and Twitter production page as we knew our target audience are very active on these websites. Also, we knew that by using these social media websites we would be able to distribute our production out to a mass audience. I created a Facebook group where individuals could become a member of our group and then comment and ‘like’ our post containing our final short film. Similarly, I also created a Twitter account where users could ‘retweet’, ‘favourite’ and reply to our tweet containing a link to our final short film.

I was very happy with the overall feedback received from these social media websites as many of my friends and followers commented back informing me about how much they enjoyed our final film and found it very humorous. Many of my friends also helped promote our short film by reposting the link asking others to check it out as pictured below.

Focus Group

Finally, I then assembled a focus group with three volunteers from my target audience to gather more feedback. The one problem I faced when doing this was I was unable to find individuals over the age of 19 who were willing to take part; however, I had previously shown the final production to individuals between the ages of 19 and 35 and receive positive verbal feedback. I ensured the participants taking part in the focus group were completely honest and gave genuine responses as I wanted the responses to be as realistic and non-biased as possible. I began by showing each volunteer the final production to remind them of it, forewarned them of the questions I was going to ask them and then recorded their responses. The questions I asked were as follows:

1. What was the best part of the film?
2. What was a weakness of our film?
3. What genre did you think the film was?
4. What would you rate our film out of 10?
5. What do you think could have been improved?

This is the feedback I received from my focus group:

Reponses to Question 1:

For the first question I asked the participants what they thought was the best part of our short film and received very varied responses. One individual from my focus group mentioned how they thought the best part of our film was the shots used, whilst another mentioned the acting. This links well with our post-questionnaire results where I found that the majority of respondents thought the camerawork and acting were the strongest components of our film. This suggests the responses are highly reliable.

Finally, from the responses I also found that one individual found the voiceover portraying the thoughts of Suki D humorous. This was a great response to receive as including voiceover was a last minute idea in hope it would add more humour and excitement to the production which I believe has successfully been done due to receiving this response.

Reponses to Question 2:

For this question I wanted to find out what the participants believe was a weakness of our short film. One responded said they felt the production had a lack of characters, suggesting we could have included more characters to make the production more interesting and captivating. Another respondent mentioned how they felt there was only a limited amount of locations used. This suggests that the lack of locations could have been the reason the production may not have been as interesting as we had hoped. The response which I was least shocked by was from a male respondent who thought a weakness of our film was the lighting, due to it being fairly dark and dull in certain scenes. I was not very shocked by this response as I was well aware myself that some of the scenes were brighter than others after looking back at the final production.

Responses to Question 3:

For question 3 I wanted to ask the respondents what genre they thought the short film fit into. Successfully, all respondents said they believed our short film was a comedy film which was a great response. When carrying out our post-questionnaire I also found that 100% of respondents thought our short film fitted into the comedy genre. By receiving this response I am aware that we have successfully managed to follow the codes and conventions associated with a comedy film, therefore allowing the audience to identify the genre.

Responses to Question 4:

I then asked the respondents what they would rate the short film out of 10. I chose to ask this question as this would allow me to see how satisfied the audience were with our final production. All three of the responses received were between 7 and 8 out of 10. This was an outstanding response from our focus group and suggested that the final production was entertaining, intriguing and represented the comedy genre well. This response has also resulted in me feeling very pleased and content with our final production, ‘Big Boy’.

Responses to Question 5:

For the final question I asked respondents what they thought could have been improved. I chose to include this question as it would give me an insight into what we could have done differently to make our final production more successful. From the responses I found that one respondent thought a wider range of locations could have been used to make the production more interesting and engaging. Another improvement that was suggested was that the lighting could have remained consistent throughout the entire production. Finally, another suggestion was that the main character could have interacted with more characters other than Lady Candy to make the production more captivating and engrossing.

Conclusion

Overall, from my audience feedback I have learnt that our film has successfully followed the codes and conventions associated with the comedy genre as we have managed to make our audience laugh and enjoy the production. I have also learnt that certain aspects of the production were weak and could have been improved, such as the amount of characters used and the lighting. By collecting this audience feedback I was able to find out the strengths and weaknesses of our production, as well as improvements that could be made to ensure the production could reach its full potential which is vital in creating a successful production.

Evaluation Q4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

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