Evaluation - audience feedback, what did we learn?

In order to gain some audience feedback, we recruited a few of our classmates, asked them to watch the rough cut of our short film, and then filmed their responses. We asked them to be as brutally honest as they liked. This way, we can get a better idea of the way the general public are likely to interpret the product, and also the kind of reactions we can be expecting to receive.  In creating this short montage of some of the comments our classmates provided, we learnt a lot about which elements of our product worked well, and which elements were not as effective.   For example, all three of the participants in this video said that they liked the first person perspective camera angles that were used. They complimented the technique used to produce such shots, and generally admired the overall effect created by them. In terms of the narrative of our short film, the idea is that we are seeing how two people's separate lives can link up in certain ways, and how the actions of one person may affect another person. We felt that the first person perspective was the best way to portray the experiences of each of the characters, so it was very pleasing that this came across well to our audience focus group. Initially we had some concerns that our audience may get confused between the two character narratives occurring simultaneously, but we were assured that the contrasts between the two characters were evident, and that each individual story was easily followed.   There were mixed reviews about the music we chose to include in the short film. At the time of creating this audience research, we were only showing them a rough cut of our product. The rough cut only included one piece of music (Beautiful World -Mark Knight). After hearing that the audience found the song to be a little repetitive after a while of listening, it was decided that we needed to mix things up a little bit, and so chose to include a second piece of music. In hindsight, the two contrasting pieces of music represent the two states of conciousness experienced by the male character (his premonition, and then reality). The change in music signals the change between these two states, and actually act as a huge help in defining where the character is in the narrative, and so makes the narrative even easier to follow. Our focus group did us a big favour by suggesting that idea. 
One of our participants suggested that some of our shots were too long, and that the fast paced music made him feel like the shots should change more rapidly to keep up with that. This was something i also felt when watching the rough cut, and so during the final production we went back and broke our longer shots into a series of rapid jump cuts. These gave the action an increased sense of urgency. Have you ever noticed that often, in horror movies, the antagonist seems to be able to move from one place to another at superhuman speeds? It's a similar concept to that. It tends to make us feel like there's more to this than meets the eye, and if done well, makes us feel just slightly uneasy. I feel that this is applicable and effective in our coursework in order to further emphasise the idea that this some kind of premonition, as opposed to regular reality the way we normally see it.  
Overall, all of our participants reported that they were able to understand the narrative that was being presented, and felt that the editing techniques made the story easy to follow. 
from our feedback, its evident that there are still a few creases that need to be ironed out. I feel that the issues we most need to focus on are: 

• length of the shots (this was corrected by cutting pieces of footage that we felt were too long into a series of much shorter, much punchier jump cuts.) 
• choice of music (as mentioned before, we later included a second, very different piece of music in order to counteract the repetitiveness that is common with House music. This also provided good contrasting between the premonition scenes and the scenes that were occurring in reality.)
• Length of the premonition scenes - taking too long to get to the major parts of the film (by reducing the length of the shots in the opening minutes of the short film, the premonition scene is automatically shortened as a result of this. However, we took this comment into account and removed some pieces of footage that we deemed unnecessary, or unrelated to the plot line, in order to arrive at the more interesting pieces of action more rapidly, therefore giving the audience something worth watching, so as to not lose their attention)