Roughcut Feedback

One of the important things about making and improving a film is audience feedback, after all the film is made for them. After finishing our rough cut we showed it to our Media class, this is because they're the right age for our target audience, so they're the best people to judge our film opening sequence and tell us what they think worked well and what we can improve on.

Heres what they thought:

• More titles at the beginning to make it clear it's a film
• Liked it - the sound is clear and effective
• Loads of camera shots/good variety
• Music is good/appropriate
• The ending where Beth (the character 'Evelyn') goes down could be more dramatic
• Dialogue is out of time in places
• Some points are confusing - needs more exposition (Why are they at the beach? Why does Amber look annoyed and walk away?)
• Camera stuff works well
• End section was good
• Cut down the first section we get the idea pretty quickly

What will we do?

It's not enough to just get the feedback, you need to listen to your audience and improve your piece to fit what they want. 

At the point we completed our rough cut, we hadn't yet finished everything completely. We still needed to add in our ident and finish our title sequence, so the first thing the audience said has already been thought through. We had the idea to run titles throughout the beach scene at the beginning, which gives it more of a point so we wouldn't have to cut it down, plus it's a lot more traditional than having it at the end of the opening like in our original idea.

We're going to look for different music and sound to put throughout the whole thing just to add tension into the sequence a bit more. This will make the ending a lot more dramatic which was mentioned in the feedback.

We've also started to edit the dialogue to be more in sync with the clips. During the editing we had to detach the audio and adjust it slightly to make it fit more due to background noise and the flow of guitar. This is probably the reason parts of it are out of place but this can easily be fixed.

To make it clearer why the group are there we're going to dub audio over the top of the beach scene at the beginning, giving the illusion that it's just one of the group speaking about something along the lines of "It's freezing, we're never going camping in the winter again." and to explain Amber's mood "She always gets annoyed when she's drunk."