first draft

Q3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the stages of the film: pre-production, production and post production, feedback was vital as it was important. They are the ones we are making our film for – they are the king of our film.
Within the pre production stage of making our film we got feedback for the pitch, script and story board. We started with the feedback for the pitch. As we got feedback we ended up doing three drafts and the last draft improved dramatically. As a group we were told that the first two lacked character development, plot twists and logical causality. We were told we didn’t have names for the characters or the title, it needs to be much clearer where the bullies get the lamp from, the story was too long and complicated, there was a lot of unnecessary scenes which drag the story on, it’s good how we brought the use of the lamp into the story, it is much more effective and shorter (third draft), and more narrative development and logical causality (third draft). We fed on this feedback and started to change the affected parts of our pitch which basically made us get to the third draft of our pitch which was much better. We did this same procedure with the script re-drafting it three times. The main criticism we were given was that the script contains too much dialogue and that we should use actions and visuals to tell the story and show characters rather than have too much dialogue. So in the script we showed directions and actions of the character rather than them saying something. For example instead of Luke saying “yeah I like that”, he would simply smile and nod his head. This also develops the character. With our storyboard, we were told it lacked cutaway shots so we then received help from our media class and placed them where we thought it was much needed. However with our first storyboard we lacked cutaway shots in one scene and there was too many in another, so we started fresh. This helped us to realise that without cutaway shots, the story lacked development. So adding them made our film more interesting and more understandable.
In post production we did three different posters. For poster one we had feedback such as: The writing coming out of the lamp looks good and works well but it needs glitter or smoke coming out to connect it and make it look better, suggestions about changing the colour of her headband and eyes, Olivia shouldn't be on this poster and use this poster for just Luke and Genie, some people debated that Luke should be in his 'geek' state and some said that it 'gives away the film'. The person in charge of the poster in our group took all these criticisms into consideration and redrafted the poster into the 4th draft. All the criticism helped to reflect our fantasy genre such as the sparkles etc and made our film look in comparison to Aladdin or Peter Pan.