Audience Feedback

We wanted to find out what people thought of our thriller, collect some constructive feedback from them and see what they thought worked and what didn't. We printed out some feedback sheets, asked a random group of teenagers and asked them to watch our thriller then fill in the questions. The questions where; 1) what do you think the basic plot to this thriller is? 2) What do you think are the key strengths of this thriller and why? 3) How do you think this thriller could be made even more effective and why?

For the first question the answers were very similar, people easily identified the rough detective plot (however we should have made clearer the relationship between the detective and the femme fatal because few people remarked on it or noted it) and many mentioned that "it reminded [them] of a thriller from the 1940's" which was exactly what we were looking to convey so we are very pleased and consider our efforts to make a 40s style thriller a success.

The comments about the key strengths of our thriller mainly consist of compliments about the music, how it fits well with the time and effectively builds tension, Emma Smith said, "the music is very atmospheric and effective". Again the set was mentioned numerous times, saying it was well made and realistic as a detective’s office.

For the last question there were two answers in particular that were most consistent and that we also as a group agree with, 1) People commented on how the death scene (gun shot) could be made more realistic and if I were to make the thriller all over again I would do exactly that and focus more on sorting out the murder and how realistic and effective it looks for the audience. 2) Many mentioned that they thought the thriller should be put in black and white and this is something that we ourselves are still deciding too, we originally thought that Film Noirs had to be in black and white however have since learnt otherwise and that many are in fact in colour. We don’t like the colours in our thriller at the moment, they look fake and too bright, however we also feel that a black and white filter is too simple and too obvious. We have decided to saturate the film considerably and that a cold bluish filter should be added to make it more eerie and look more effective.

Overall I am pleased with the feedback we received and have taken into account the comments on the colour of the film and will change this.

TASK 7

Our Thriller and our Preliminary Task we did at the very beginning of are vastly different. The first difference between the two is that in the preliminary task we were allowed to pick our groups whereas for our thriller we had a groups delegated to us which was a massive challenge seeing as we were all very different people and had tendency to argue about our ideas, in the long run it was beneficial because we all matured and became more patient with one an other. Because we all had such different personalities our ideas and thoughts were very different so this benefited the thriller as a whole.

For our preliminary tasks we got given a storyboard which we had to follow so we had to take the camera shots that were given on the storyboard, however for our thriller we created our own storyboard this then made the thriller much more of a challenge then our prelim task because we called the shots. Deciding which camera shots we would take and how our thriller would be structured.

In our preliminary task we used a very limited amount of shots including medium wide shots, wide shots and close ups. There was no noticeable high or low angle shots within our prelim so it is very noticeable that our thriller camera work is much more complicated because we have a much wider variety of camera shots.

Another difference between our prelim and our thriller is the difference in the importance of the Mise-en-scene. In our preliminary task the Mise-en-scene was very basic. An example of this is for our prelim we only used natural and no artificial lighting whereas in our thriller we used LED lights, Red heads and light reflectors to create the perfect lighting state. For our prelim we only had one lesson to film in whereas for a thriller we had a whole day. This is evident in our prelim because it appears rushed and not organized. This is the same for our for our prelim we only had 2 lessons to edit whereas for our thriller we had 3 weeks. Another difference is that our thriller shows how much preparation and work has gone into creating it whereas our prelim shows there was little preparation and work spent on researching and planning.

 

Undoubtedly our editing for our thriller was better than our prelim. Initially because we had more time to edit our thriller then our prelim. Another reason is that when we were editing our prelim it was the first time we were using Final Cut Pro, so it was a learning process so when it came to editing our thriller we were more experienced and familiar with the program. I found that with our thriller we were able to make smoother transitions between shots but the biggest difference between the two is that in our thriller we were able to use special effects making a sizeable difference. The sound for our prelim task was of very low quality, with some sounds much louder than others and some, which contained our group speaking behind the scenes. For our thriller we were able include sound effects using sound track pro and both pan and compress sounds to make sure they were at an even volume. 

TASK 6

Here is our finished product and also an explanation of how we used digital technologies in our Thriller.

Addressing Our Target Audience (TASK 5)

Individual Audience Member (Tumblr) (TASK 4)

Here is the link to an individual audience members tumblr blog:

                                                                    

http://the-dark-city.tumblr.com/archive

Dark City's blog has many black and white photographs from noir films such as Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard, we can see from their blog that they have a strong passion for noir and neo noir films and thrillers from the 1940's. This blogger is the perfect example of the type of audience we feel would enjoy our film because it is a neo noir based on a 1940's style detective thriller.

Who would be the audience for our thriller (TASK 4)

Seeing as our thriller sequence is a film noir our target audience would be quite diverse. For example film noir has been around since the 1940s therefore many a people would be attracted to watch it from the older generation through to younger people that are interested in older films. An example of a old noir style film in Brighton Rock which was remade in 2010 by Roland Joffe and will therefore target a younger audience who may rediscover older film noirs through this. Our film is a homage to 40s film noir a film such as The Big Sleep, the Maltese Falcon and Sunset Boulevard. These films are classics so therefore they will target a wide audience of film fans around the world.

Film noir underwent resurgence in the 1990s with neo noir films coming out such as LA Confidential, The Last Seduction and The Usual Suspects. These films at the time of release were targeting a younger audience and although you wouldn’t say they were mainstream they had a widespread release although their audience was probably a little more niche than that. I feel that the audience for our thriller will be equally men and women of any ages over the age of 15 but because of the subject matter and the attention to period detail our film would probably target a more mature audience. Younger fans may appreciate our film if they discovered it girls in particular because of our strong female lead character men would like to court her whereas women would like to be her. As goes for our lead male with older women being attracted to him and younger women might want to watch it just to see him get his comeuppance.

Overall I think our film will probably mainly appeal to over 30s equally male and female and would probably get shown at art-house cinemas and therefore appeal a niche audience. A younger audience of 18- 30 would also like our film but that would mainly be the secondary audience unless they were cineastes.