Audience feedback from the showcase evening

• We had an overwhelming positive response from our written audience feedback, taken during our showcase evening. The questions that received high levels of encouragement were the choice of setting, the narrative of the video in fitting with the song, the editing was also something that a number of people highlighted as excellent and the use of camera angles. We had a large number of written responses; therefore our group decided it would be easier to divide them evenly. I ended up with all my sheets being between the age of 0-20 and it was fairly spit from there in terms of gender. Also none of my feedback forms stated they enjoyed listening to Indie music regularly or that Indie was their favourite type of music, instead most people stated their favourite genre of music was R&B, Pop, dance and two people liked rock music. However from the 18 response forms 14 people left a mark out of 10 and this averaged an 8. We scored an even better 9/10 from Radhika’sresearch.

Some negatives that we picked up on were-

• A lot of feedback referred to the change in the main character’s appearance, as he cut his hair. We couldn’tcontrol the fact that our actor decided to cut his hair, it was his individual choice and we understand this may have looked unrealistic, but in defence it’squite clearly the same boy.

The White Stripes

• Some comments praised the choice of costume, suggesting it ‘fitted well’ however not everyone agreed we had one comment suggesting that the boy shouldn’t have worn a suit. Although given that our genre was indie, we decided that suit’s would work well because it is typical of the genre. We put a lot of thought and background research into costume and it certainly wasn’t a case of whatever he was wearing on the day. We tried to be consistent, even when filming on different days; we dressed the same or in similar clothing. 
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• I wanted to include some images of the Killers because they are a good example of an indie band that dresses smartly. The Killers images were taken by me, at Hard Rock Calling last summer, and it was pouring down with rain, so I didn't manage to get the best quality images. The Killers always dress smart in a way it's like their trade mark, when I saw them live, Brandon Flowers the lead singer was even wearing a suit.
  

• Some comments suggested we needed a more isolated area for the main kidnapping scene; some felt the park was too open. This was definitely a fair point; however we may have corrected this issue, from editing this scene.

• One individual picked up on the unrealistic nature of the gun prop and we would agree that the gun prop looked unrealistic however in conversation with a shop owner who sold the toy guns, we found due to gun crime, the government did not want to promote these weapons and they are commonly found in bright colours, instead of looking realistic. We tried to help this issue by only showing glimpses of the weapon and not including it much in the video. In 2001 toy guns were the height of debate, and the minister at the time, Charles Clarke said replicas posed a "real threat" to society. I even have an image of him, holding both a replica gun and a real gun.
  I guess the big negative point we will have in our evaluation, is the unrealistic nature of the gun, and if we was to do this again, we would spray paint it.
   

• Positives   
   We had a number of good comments about the editing and how well it was constructed; we were really happy with these comments, because we put a lot of effort into this particular area.Although the video that was shown on the showcase night was a draft and we had corrected some of our previous mistakes, take for example the critical scene at the end where the boy shoots the girl. We found that the location needed to be in the background more given that, it was in a public park and not the most inconspicuous place, therefore we changed the sequence and made the characters facial expressions more dominant in the shot selection, with quick editing of the action taking place, this also didn’t include any shots with dog walkers in the background. This is something that the audience fed back to us, having seen the draft. We did feel the reality was lost in the shot where dog walkers could be seen, and we’re quite happy that we have taken this out.
•  I found a number of comments relaying the good choice in characters, they seemed to think the actors fit well with the genre, in terms of appearance and costume choice.

• A couple of people said they found the concept easy to understand and gripped them straight away. One person said ‘There was a lot of suspense, it made me intrigued. The stalking part was pulled off really well.’

• However some people didn’t manage to understand the concept of the narrative, but it’s fair to say from the feedback the majority of people did. Overall when evaluating all feedback forms,including those of other members of my group, I found that the younger individuals that we asked to evaluate the piece didn’t seem to understand the themes of the narrative, as much as older individuals. We asked a class of year sevens and eights to answer the feedback form, and this age group seemed to be the ones struggling with the themes of the narrative. However seen as the target audience was mainly 15-30 year olds, and indie music lovers, we wasn't too concerned about their lack of understanding for mature themes.

• We also included more performance based shots that we initially thought we would, however in our opinion we thought they worked well.