Evaluation: Question 3

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Once we had got a rough cut production, we set out on gaining audience feedback on what they thought of our production and if they had any suggestions for improvements to our film, ready for the final film. By doing this before completing our film, we were able to add the improvements to our final cut of our film. The feedback was very helpful to us when it came to adapting our rough cut to the final production as we were able to take the audiences suggestions and make it an acceptable standard for our target audience. However, we had some technical difficulties with the tape that we used to film our audience feedback; therefore we had to take a different approach on gaining the audiences opinions on our rough cut. I did this by using the popular social networking site Facebook. By doing this I was able to send out over 20 questionnaires (using our original survey/audience feedback questions) via email to a variety of different people: male and female within our target audience. This was very useful as I was able to send out a large quantity of people and gain more detailed feedback, therefore we were able to take a more detailed look at our film and pick up on the things that the audience suggested we improve upon. If I were to do it again I would use a larger variety of different feedback techniques as I found both the surveys and the filming approach very useful in gaining the feedback we required. If I were to film again I would gather around 10-15 people in a room and allow them to all watch our film at the same time, and after the film was finished, give them the questions and film them all together as I believe a group approach is better than an individual approach due to the length of time it took for us to gain each individual persons opinion. I would also use the survey technique over social networking sites: if would do this due to the variety of people they attract and that we are able to gain a wider variety of opinions that are not necessarily based where we need them to be for the filming (for example one of the questionnaires I sent out was to Scotland).
During the filming and editing process of our main production we were able to establish the meaning of our film and make it apparent to the audience due to the content we included. Due to our target audience being of mainly the working class we included characters of the working class, this way our target audience were able to associate and ‘connect’ with the characters and feel that they do belong and are at ease with their own status. Because of this we included mostly action shots of the fire fighters working/ training their courtyard: basically what they actually do for a living instead of what the media are portraying, allowing a real/ true incite as to what they do. We felt that these action shots were an important feature to our production and so we continued them throughout.
When we were planning our film, we intended the structure of our film to cut from one section e.g. outside with the hoses to an interview in the office. However when we arrived at the fire station the fire fighters were very keen to get involved with our production, this resulted them allowing us to film everything they did e.g. the cleaning of the hoses, inside the fire engine, ladder training and them going up 120ft in the cage on the back of a fire engine (RTC). They also invited us along to film them using the steel equipment that assists them when they attend car accidents etc. Due to their eager behaviour and interest in our film were able to gain a lot of action, hands-on footage. We used this footage to our advantage and included the appropriate action shots in our film, which made our film a much higher quality than we could have ever anticipated.
Overall, I believe that our film can connect to almost any one and is not culturally bound. Due to our production being about the Barnsley Fire Service, we are able to connect with not only the Barnsley population but with people throughout the country and possible the world due to the subject: the Fire Service, everybody is able to connect as they all have a local fire station that do the same job throughout the globe as everywhere, whether large or small village, town, city county, everywhere has local fire service protecting them.