EVALUATION QUESTION 3

For us to progress any further, we needed to gain feedback from our audience in order to gain an idea of where we was at and where we needed to be in order to make our 3 products work effectively as a package. The first feedback we received was when we first pitched our short film ideas to the audience (which the link can be found on my blog). This was very helpful to us because we was thinking of embedding an African culture with our short film however as we gathered from the feedback, there were many issues concerning this. Firstly there was the issue of timing whether we can input all of these cultures and themes in the required time limit; secondly there was the issue of the audience comprehending all these stereotypes in one go, and lastly the difficulty of exploring an Asian and African culture cohabiting in the nature of our short film was proven to be harder than we actually thought. There was also much positive feedback to our film pitch as the audience really liked our ideas for example the love scene that we described to them followed by the comedy aspect we wanted to convey. We explored Asian culture through the use of music as we used an Indian soundtrack within the day dream scene. Also, the English stereotype was also explored through the use of the main characters costume being smart however we slightly tweaked this in order for it to relate back to the humour aspect of our film for example the fact that the main characters trousers are tucked into his socks. Others in in the audience feedback exercise found our ideas confusing however I think that this is because I felt that we didn’t really express our ideas clearly enough to them whereas other people found it easier to understand thus gave them an insight from our point of view. Soon during the exercise, another issue began to emerge with regards to the locations we wanted to us as the audience found it confusing of how the characters going to get to these locations and also how it’s going to work within our short film For example the airport scene where the main character arrives and the park where the daydream scene will take place. In my opinion I think it was effective for some people in the audience feedback exercise to find our ideas slightly confusing and to question our ideas because it made us think that maybe our ideas might have been too difficult for our audience to understand so it helped us to combat this issue as we thought of ways to simplify our ideas in our short film. The second audience feedback exercise for the ideas of our print products was also very helpful to us as it helped us to identify our strengths and expose our weaknesses. This was shown in the draft that we had produced of one of our print products as it gave the audience a very good idea of how we wanted our film poster to look like. We gained positive feedback from our draft poster as they thought it looked really good and thought it worked well with our main theme of comedy. The also thought it was a good idea to the use aspects from the ‘East is East’ and ‘West is West’ case studies that we have looked at for example the splash effect that shows certain images of some funny scenes that occur within the film which again sells the film for what it actually is which grabs the audience’s attention. There was also some negative feedback that we received which was the use of the tagline ‘Same Monty, Different Country’. The audience thought it was simple and straight to the point as the main character is from another country as comes to London for a daytrip however some crack were exposed in this for example, this tagline sort of gives away what happens in the film but the main concern of all was that if we used this tagline it would suggest that we have made previous films with this same character which would have made things more complicated than what they actually were. It was difficult for us to think of a new tagline for our film poster however in the end we just decided to keep it simple and go with ‘Are You Ready London? It’s’ which we as group thought worked well with the title of the film ‘Monty’s day out’. We then revisited the ‘Mr Bean’ case study that we did and thought that we could use some features that worked really well there in our poster for example a funny still of Mr Bean himself in the middle of the picture. We used this idea on the film poster and the audience thought it worked really well with the combination of the splash effects. We was told that it shows a “crazy’ day out with all sorts happening in a funny way” which we accepted as a compliment because it was what we was trying to portray. With regards to the film review, it wasn’t really completed by the time we had to present the pitch to the audience. We presented what we had at that time and explained to the best we could of what we wanted to do with the film review. The film review script itself wasn’t an issue for me to do however the issue was the stills. We had to be very critical of this as we trialled a few still images and presented it to our audience on a separate occasion for example a still of the day dream scene when the main character and the girl are holding hands portrayed a love theme which was totally irrelevant to us because our 3 products must work as a comedy package. This was helpful to us because it was the audience that suggested a suitable scene for us where the main character is eating the biscuit and its falling out of his mouth because it was one of the funniest scenes in the film and somewhat iconic. The post production feedback that we received was through the use of an online survey which basically was an online questionnaire. This was very easy to produce and was very effective because it’s straight and to the point. We generally received good feedback from this which was a success in our minds.