Evaluation

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From the questionnaire results, the target audience for our short film are females aged 12-25. This is the audience feedback I received.

1. The first audience feedback knew from the dancing based storyline and the fact that most of the characters are women that Jete was targeted towards women. She complimented the dancing and enjoyed the music but found it hard to find closure with the ending. She found the cliff-hanger to be too cheesy and wanted a structured ending but she did react positively to how well put together and edited the whole short film was.

2. The second audience feedback, from a man, found that there wasn’t enough action and that the plot didn’t live up to expectations. He felt that there was too much dancing and thought it became boring and repetitive. Due to the fact that Jete is female dominated, it may explain why the feedback is negative because he’s film tastes are more adrenaline/action packed.

3. The third audience feedback, again from a man, found that the dancing was also a bit boring and became uninterested. He liked the link throughout the music and the titles were unique. He found the ending was original and really liked that you could make up your mind about what happened to the protagonist, on whether she made it into the dance school or not.

4. The final feedback is from a female and really positive and supportive. She found that she could identify with the characters and thought the standard of dancing was really high. She didn’t like the mother though but understood that she was the disequilibrium within the narrative. She liked the storyline and thought the plot of the Jete was interesting to watch.

What have you learned from the audience feedback?

If I were to go back and make changes or to make another short film, I would make sure I have a proper ending instead of a cliff-hanger. In some short films leaving an open ending works well but from the audience feedback, I now know it didn’t work as well as we hoped.
A main positive aspect from the feedback was the music. After listening to many songs and soundtracks, we finally found a song all of us agreed to use, fitting it all together and choreograph to the music was a hard task but my group and I all put in a lot of time and hard work and throughout the editing stages, we put a lot of effort into making every second sound pitch perfect.
Using new technology in post production was fun to play with but when everything was being put together, it became difficult. Due to none of my group being trained with the software, we had to learn as we went along. Creating a voiceover was tricky but once we’d got to grips with it, everything went on fine. The transitions were limited on the software we used but we used it to the best of our ability and created realism within the short film.
Some of the dancing looked repetitive. To correct this, I would’ve expanded the range of shots we had to create a different look of the film. I wanted to try a bird’s eye view shot but without having the safe equipment to achieve this, we couldn’t complete that shot. If I were to create another short film, I’d want to branch out of the types of shots I create.
When making a short film, you cannot cater to everyone’s tastes and make everyone enjoy what you’ve created.
Keeping what you create original is important, your audience will not get bored or guess what happen in the narrative. If you follow a generic formula, add some plot twists to keep the audience guessing.

Personal response:

Overall, I believe my group and I created a great little short film. If I could go back and start over again, there are many things I would change, such as, change the ending and re-shoot the opening credits sequence to cut down the time. Throughout the process of making Jete though, I expanded my knowledge of the subject of media, not only learning about creating a short film but about the pre-production, post-production, marketing and distribution.
Creating Jete was one of the most brilliant experiences in my life. I’ve realised what career path I want to head into because I love making films and creating moving image.