Hello, my name is Emily Atkinson and I am undertaking a film project for my Advanced Portfolio Media coursework alongside my classmate Hannah Duncan. Our project was to create a film supported by two secondary products, a film poster and a magazine review of the film. If you could give me some feedback on our products for my evaluation it would be much appreciated. Please circle each appropriate answer and respond to each question to the best of your ability. Thank you!
1) Age:
Under 18
18 - 29
30 - 44
45 +
2) Gender:
Male
Female
Prefer not to say
3) Was “The Lover Who Lied” a good and appropriate title for the film?
Yes, definitely Average Poor Terrible
4) Did you think “The Lover Who Lied” was a successful student film?
Very successful Good Average Poor Terrible
5) Was “The Lover Who Lied” recognisable in our intended era of 1940’s America?
Yes No Maybe
6) Was the film stylistically successful in black and white or do you think it would have been better in colour? Please support your answer.
Black and white Colour
____________________________________________________________________
7) Do you think our film was a successful tribute to the genre of film noir in terms of following codes and convention? If not, please state why.
Yes No
____________________________________________________________________
8) Do you think that “The Lover Who Lied” worked as a noir short film? If not please state why.
Yes No
____________________________________________________________________
9) Did the film make sense to the audience? If not, please state why.
Yes No
____________________________________________________________________
10) Was the film engaging? Please support your answer.
Very engaging Okay Boring Terrible
____________________________________________________________________
11) Did we cast our characters well?
Yes No
12) Did we effectively create meaning using various media devices? Please answer for the following elements yes or no.
Yes No Mise-en-scene (costumes, props)
Yes No Body language
Yes No Camera work
Yes No Dialogue
Yes No Lighting
Yes No Editing (fades and cross-cutting)
13) Please rate the quality of our work in “The Lover Who Lied” regarding the following elements out of 5, 5 for successful and 1 being terrible.
__Camera work
__Lighting
__Costume
__Props
__Set design
__Editing
__Continuity
__Script
__Sound quality
__Choice of music
__Titles/credits
14) What were the most successful aspects of our film for you?
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
15) What were the least successful aspects of our film?
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
16) Would you watch a film like “The Lover Who Lied” again, for example a remade version or a sequel?
Yes No Maybe
17) Did our three products cohere well regarding:-
Colour scheme? Yes No Maybe
Visual style/use of image? Yes No Maybe
Typefaces? Yes No Maybe
Layout? Yes No Maybe
Language? Yes No Maybe
18) Was our film effectively supported and represented by our two sub-products? Please support your answer.
Yes, very well Quite well Not really Badly
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
19) Overall, how successful were our three products together?
Excellent Good Average Poor Terrible
Thank you so much for your time! Your feedback has been invaluable!
ANALYSIS:
Analysing the results of our post-production questionnaire, we were pleased to see we had successfully reached a perfectly balanced proportion of each age demographic and an almost perfect balance of male/female ratio. 88% felt that our film title ‘The Lover Who Lied’ was a completely appropriate film title, which for us is a huge success. Only 3% of participants believed it was poor or terrible, with the remaining 9% considering it to be average. However, less obviously successful were the results in response to how successfully our participants thought we had made a student film. 3% believed it was poor or terrible, 9% average and 88% believed it was either good or very successful, with the highest proportion of responses being “very successful”. We are pleased with this result considering the subjectivity in appreciating film as well as the technical difficulties we encountered. However 9% believed our film was not recognisable in its intended era of America in the 1940s. Although this is comparable to 58% answering maybe and 33% responding with “yes”, it is still an element we need to consider more carefully next time in conveying the context of the film to our audience. Much of it may have been missed in the unclear dialogue. We were interested to see that while 84% agreed with our stylistic decision to use black and white, a significant 16% of participants believed it would have been more successful in colour. We interested to find these responses supported with reasons such as it would be more attractive, more geared for a modern audience and even more expressive, flagging up the potential for loss of meaning or feeling in the absence of colour filming. This audience feedback has made us consider the potential for a “film noir” in all but colour, and its possible power as a genre or new subcategory of neo-noir.
Almost all of our audience, an impressive 98%, considered “The Lover Who Lied” to be a successful tribute to film noir and 97% as a successful short film which we felt this to be a massive compliment. Of the 2% who did not believe it to be a successful tribute, it was important for us to discover why and both participants answered that the sound quality ruined the success of the film. Of the 3% who did not feel “The Lover Who Lied” was a successful short film, 2% blamed sound quality and 1% said the film made no sense, which again could possibly be blamed on the sound. While frustrating, it highlights the integral value of sound quality to appreciating and understanding film.
95% found our film to be engaging, with reasons such as the aesthetics, the cinematography, and most highly attributed the music and the “good plot with a twist” as the reasons why. The reasons which acted against the films engagement were the dialogue, the difficulty in understanding the plot and the fact it was not long enough to fully express the story. This feedback has made us consider scaling back our plot complexity and the ambitiousness of our story in a short film next time for simpler, cleaner and more ingenious concepts.
100% felt we cast our characters well so we have no doubts about the actors we managed to used, and realised that this element of film is such an important one in the professionalism and zest of a short film. Of the other elements rated in the questionnaire, most often rated successful were cinematography (100%) lighting (97%) editing (99%) and mise-en-scene (98%.) These visual elements were the most successfully received. The poorest received, as we expected, was the dialogue, with only 80% believing this was a good aspect of our film, perhaps only because of the music choices.
However, in numerical ratings, the highest scored element were actually the costumes out of 10, achieving 498 out of 500, seconded by set design (482) and followed by editing, with 470. The lowest rated was of course sound quality, with 212 out of 500, and actually then titles/credits, scoring 330 out of 500. We were surprised by this but considered that because of our simplistic and some difficulties we encountered in the positioning of the credit text at the end of our film, they didn’t end up looking as polished as we may have hoped. However they were still generally quite well received.
We were very much surprised with the result that 82% wanted to see a remake or a sequel to “The Lover Who Lied” with 11% responding with “maybe” indicating that, despite its flaws, overall our audience genuinely liked the film, saw its potential or wanted to see more. This has taught us that the overall impression of the film has been positive and interested despite the less than perfect feedback on some of its micro-elements.
With regard to the uniformity of our three products, the film, the poster and the magazine review, there were mixed reviews of the elements which tied our project together. 64% believed the colour scheme cohered well between the three, which is an average response and made us question some of our decisions to use unconventional approaches in a modern take on noir. We have realised that perhaps what we viewed would be most appropriate for noir in a magazine (striking, bold, white, black and red) compared to noir in a poster (muted colours, “modern” black and white) compared to a film noir (true monochrome) didn’t actually manage to match up stylistically, and we should have introduced some more uniformity in the colour scheme either with “muted” colours or stay true to the monochrome theme in all three products.
However our use of visual style was well received with regards to uniformity, with 91% responding that our photography correctly matched and successfully corresponded with each other in all three products, which is what we expected when we conducted the stills photography to emulate the film’s cinematography.
Our audience feedback reflected some inconsistency in the layout of our three products, whereby only 68% believed they cohered well. As the layout of the poster and the magazine article are the main products to be considered here, we have acknowledged that we were indeed pressed for time in the creation of these two ancillary products and perhaps did not layout the products successively with a view to the two combining successfully. Our use of language was more successfully received, with 72% believing it to be successful and the rest responding with “maybe.” A possible area of improvement would be to employ more powerful and high-impact language on both the poster and sensationalist, critic’s language on the review to more clearly convey the short noir film genre we wanted to express in all three products.
Overall we received lukewarm, positive feedback regarding the support and representation of the main product by the two sub-products, with 52% responding with “effectively” and 42% with “quite well” with the main given reason being that you could tell the genre of the film in all three products, and they complimented each other well, targeting our audience well. Only 6% felt that they were not effectively supporting “The Lover Who Lied” or not at all, supporting their responses with the comment that they could have been made to look more similar to one another.
The success of our three products overall was rated at excellent by 48% of our audience, and good by 45%. 6% rated it average, for reasons we assume already detailed in the earlier responses regarding sound quality, colour schemes, layouts and understanding our plot, and only one participant believed our products were poor overall.
To conclude, as this audience feedback has shaped our views on the successes and flaws in our project hugely, we believed that by and large our participants appreciated the look of our film and our images in the sub-products. They felt that our products cohered relatively well with some areas for improvement, and that the success of our film was largely impaired by the poor sound quality in our restaurant dialogue, affecting the enjoyment and understanding of the film for some. However, our audience wanted to see more; they were engaged, wanted to see more of our story with a sequel or an extended version, and saw its potential and wanted to see a version with better audio. We were pleasantly surprised with how much our audience understood what we were trying to create and convey in our products, and how open the younger demographic were to receiving such a classic, vintage genre.
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