Evaluation

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Another part of our documentary project was to put it on YouTube and get some audience feedback. This was to see how successful our documentary was and whether it was done to a high standard or not. As well as YouTube we also posted a link to the video on Twitter and Facebook so that all of our friends could watch it and give feedback. This proved to be a much better method of getting feed back as it reached a lot of people quickly. Although most of the feedback was positive, we put this down to our friends being polite, we did get some useful constructive criticism which is what we really wanted as it would show us where we went wrong and what we could do it improve it next time.

For example some of our feedback read like this:

Twitter

Scott: “There needs to be more of a question asked or structure to this film.”

Dan: “I enjoyed watching it and some of the footage looking awesome but I got abit lost in parts and wasn’t sure what was going on.”

Sarah: “Good effort the rave looks well fun but there could have done with more of a two sided argument.”

Tom: “The background on some of the interviews was just white and boring.”

Laura: “Could have done with another older person talking, there was only one tutor talking.”

Facebook

Andy: “I’ve seen better documentaries to be honest guys seemed a little rushed in parts.”

Charlotte: “Was really interesting to watch, however need a stronger narrative.”

From this audience feedback we got a good feel of how we could have improved it. For example people said that there wasn’t a clear focus on what the documentary was about which we fully understand as we changed our idea part way through resulting in us being a little behind on filming/content. Also it was noticed that the documentary was rushed, this was due to us being pushed for time from changing topic and also we had some problems arranging filming days/times. However if we were to do it again we would be much more organised and have a clearer idea from the start. Another point that was brought up was the white background on some of the interviews, this was done to help make the interviewee stand out and have a better contrast, although now looking back it does seem rather plane and perhaps a more suited background and mise-en-scene could have been used to help fit in with the codes and conventions of a documentary. Another major problem that appeared from the audience feedback was the fact that the argument itself seemed rather one sided, having interviewed more students than older people it did give off the impression that it was biased and lacked a balanced argument. Consequently if we were to do it again we would have arranged more interviews and made them much more balanced to get across and even argument for both participating sides.

To conclude, on the whole the method of audience feedback that we used was a success we managed to get a good balance of positive and negative feedback which gave us a good insight into what we did and well and not so well. As a result of this response we would feel much more confident in making another documentary as we now have a better understanding of what the audience wants to watch and how they feel about it.