Evaluation Question 3

3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Class rough-cut feedback:

 In order for us to get opinions and thoughts from the audience on our documentary, we decided to show our rough cut documentary to our media class and we asked them a few questions on what they thought. We handed out a questionnaire for them to fill out in order for us to review their opinions. We were told that we needed to use a person who sounded professional, as it didn’t flow with our documentary. We acknowledged this criticism by changing the person for our voice over to someone who sounded more professional and had a clear voice.

 They liked Natilee’s demonstration on how to put on a condom properly and they felt that this was an effective way to inform the audience about sex and safety. However some of them said it was too long and boring, they suggested we use some music in the background to make it more engaging. We solved this problem by making her demonstration shorter and we also put sound over her interview.

 We had a mixture of both strong shots and some weak shots at the beginning of our documentary, the audience noticed this and said that it brought down our documentary and made it look tacky. We solved this by choosing the strongest shots for the beginning of our documentary and we also went out to film some shots over again to ensure that they were all strong.

Selected audience feedback:

 We showed our documentary to three people and it was shown to them from YouTube. After they had finished watching it we asked them to answer a couple of questions and we filmed their response. We made sure that the questions were easy to understand and that the answers they gave were from their own opinion and we did this by filming them separately.

 The first question we asked was ‘In what ways does the documentary reflect the generic conventions? From their answers it seems as though they believed the use of the rule of thirds in our documentary was effective as it followed conventions of a documentary and also how we framed our interviews so the interviewees were not looking directly at the camera. One of the participants said we followed the conventions of a typical 'BBC 3' documentary or 'News night' especially with our HCTV logo on the top left corner of the documentary. Also they said our documentary reflected the generic conventions in the voice over, which they said sounded professional. They also enjoyed the combination of shots, which were used to convey a in our documentary. The audience also thought the voice over sounded professional and engaged them to want to watch more of the documentary.

 The second question we asked was 'What idea did you like in our documentary and why?’ Finding out what the participants liked about our documentary was essential as it highlighted the parts where the participants enjoyed the most. One of the participants said they liked watching the interviewees as they knew about the subject they were speaking about; this is strength as the audience can see that research was done in order to find the right speakers for our interview. Also one of the participants said the like the fact that our interviewees had opinions for the debate and also opinions against. This is effective as it shows that we have thought about our documentary it also means our documentary is free from bias.

 The last question we asked was 'What are the weaknesses of the documentary'? Two of the participants said a weakness in our documentary was our phone interview. This showed us the part of our documentary which wasn't as effective. The participants said that it made the documentary look less professional.

 In conclusion the audience feedback showed us what the participants liked about our documentary and also what they disliked. All of the participants enjoyed our documentary overall and liked how it was executed. To make the documentary better, I would have used many more cut aways which related to our topic matter.