Rough Cut - Miss Georgiou

Audience feedback is extremely important to a production as it helps team members show where they have gone wrong or made a slight error. It also introduces more opinions towards our opening sequence, so we can get more of an insight towards what could be improved in order to make our sequence more effective and tension rising. Audience feedback does not always has to be negative comments, you can also be given compliments from your production and be praised for the hard work you had put into it.

We received audience feedback from our target audience through youtube. We thought this would be an easier way to get in touch with our main target generation as our target audience is aimed at mainly teenagers, and as they are the generation to be most familiar with social networking sites, using a video site like youtube would be the most suitable and efficient option. We presented a questionnaire in which they would fill relevant towards our opening sequence on things like what went well and what we could do to improve.

This particular type of feedback benefitted our production and film industry as we could see obvious things that didn't quite make sense or was made too confusing. We probably wouldn't be able to notice this without the feedback from the our target audience. After we got our feedback from our target audience back,this then helped us to make final adjustments to our product to make it that much more effective and jaw dropping, therefore making it highly conventional towards a thriller film.

For my opening sequence, me and my group recieved a range of positive feedback in which praised our hard work and effort for our media product. Some of which were:
'Highly conventional towards a thriller film,' this was one of the comments I recieved for my opening sequence. I think this is an efficient type of feedback as it allowed me to understand the importants of having your opening sequence conventional towards the thriller genre. It is important due to the fact that conventions range from a a variety of things, for example: low key lighting, characters of a antagonist and protagonist and also having tension rising non-diegetic sound. Shock, tension and suspense are extremely important when making a thriller film, especially for an opening sequence, as you intentionally want the audience to be left wanting to know more about what happened in a certain scene to a particular character.

'Good use of lighting to highlight focal points of the sequence,' this was effective as a group, we understood the importance of lighting techniques. By using low key lighting, which is a convention of a thriller, allowed the audience to understand a tone of danger and mystery towards a certain scene, for example; one of the flashbacks when Brittany is watching a happy film, which the to being the only source of light, juxtaposing the danger of the stalker and the happy film.

'Effective plot twist engaging the audience,' this was extremely important when creating a thriller film, as you want the audience to be interested. By using a physiological narrative, was seen in our team group an opinion to be most effective as it messes with the characters mind, it can also mess with the audiences mind. (The stalker a following Brittany towards thoughts and actions of death)

The negative feedback we received allowed us to understand any minor errors and mistakes we made, and allowed us to improve on them, making our opening sequence more effective. Some of which were 'The plot is seen to be too complex and maybe too much like a trailer,' this was a very helpful comment because we we decided to cut out a whole scene of a flashback in order for there to be less scenes and make more sense towards the audience. 

'The camera work was slightly unprofessional and jagged, mayb due to the camera itself being insecure,' this comment allowed us to then try to cut out any movement of the camera in the product in which would not irritate the audience when watching. I take some responsibility for this and it was my first time having my role as the camera man, but we all took turns the film as a group.

'Could do with a sound track running throughout the sequence,' we decided to add in minor sound rough out which would help to create tension throughout every scene.

Based on the comments I have recieved; as a group, we decided to cut some scenes out, for example: having three flashbacks made it seem quite confusing towards the audience as it began to become more like a trailer, we decided as a group to cut the least effective one out, this one was the alley way scene, where the victim (Brittany) was walking home from seeing friends and becomes very suspicious towards her surroundings, as she feels as if something was watching/following her. This scene was initially made to represent the paranoia that Brittany has been left with due to her stalker (Steve.) Unfortunately, this scene did go as well as we hoped as the final view of it was not as dramatic, which hugely degraded the effectiveness of the opening sequence as a whole.

We also decided to improve on our editing techniques towards the scene, as some scenes were too faint which did not create any tension or suspense and then other scenes were seemed to be too edited, which made the sequence less effective as they would not match and would look messy. We would do this in which would require using the 'Final Cut' editing software, allowing us to create more tension building moments to make our sequence much more effective and conventional. The main scene we focused on was the very first and last fraction. We toned down the editing as it looked quite purple and the focus effect was a complete normal colour, which did not improve the opening sequence in the slightest.

We also cut parts of scenes out as they seemed too long and we thought that the audience could get bored of a scene if it may have gone on for too long than they had expected, which is the opposite of trying to engage the audience into watching the whole of the opening sequence, to then watching the full product as you want to see what happens next.