Initial Feedback

On Wednesday 1st April we asked 2 people from different groups to come and view our film opening. They hadn't seen it before and didn't know what it was going to be about, so it was a good test to see if our intended audience would understand the narrative, characters and noir style as well as we all do in our group. We also took the chance to look at other group's work and compare their film ideas to ours. We asked Kamal and Laura to note down anything they liked or didn't like in our film so we could adapt our film on the basis of their comments.

Laura

• Liked the music choice and felt it was very noirey and matched the action on screen
• Didn't like the 'tumbler' effect we'd applied to our titles
• Liked the voice over as it added tension
• Understood the narrative and felt there was a good enigma

Kamal

• Didn't like the hissing sound behind the voice over and between the shots, but recommended how to sort it out
• Liked the different shots and the editing style
• Didn't like the voice over
• Liked the ending
• Hated the 'tumbler' effect on the titles as it isn't noirey at all and ruins the atmosphere

We had a week left until we'd have to finish our film, so had plenty of time to sort out what both Laura and Kamal didn't like. One of the things they both disliked was the 'tumbler' effects we had recently applied to each title. Me and Josh didn't liked the tumbler effect but agreed to allow Emily to keep it if our audience liked it. From the their feedback we decided to lose the 'tumbler' and keep a simple straight cut between titles.

Kamal's comment about the hissing noise could be fixed in two ways: either applying a fade transition between each audio bar, or inserting a recorded piece of ambiance sound between the gaps. Both methods came with the same result of continuing the hissing noise throughout but not making it noticeable to the audience. We decided on applying a 'Constant Power' audio transition that would gently fade in and out the hissing sound. This was a time consuming job but was needed to be done because it would ruin the viewing experience for our audience.

Both Laura and Kamal liked the narrative and enigmas and understood it. This was good to hear as from the presentation about our film ideas we did earlier in the year resulted in feedback about it being too complicated and difficult to understand. So this shows that even with such a complicated idea, the audience were still able to follow it.

Then there was a disagreement over the voice over. Laura liked it and said it made the film more noirey, but Kamal said he didn't like it and felt Chris's voice didn't suit it. As a group we liked the voice over and felt it added a more noirey feel and helped the audience to understand what's going on. And since we don't have much dialogue in the opening we thought the audience would be bored from just listening to the music the whole time. We therefore chose to keep the voice over as it was and hope that the majority of our audience would agree with Laura's opinion rather than Kamal's.

Both the negative and positive feedback was useful to us and we chose to act on most of it instead of ignore what our audience would want. Ideally we would have liked 3 or 4 people to look and review our film, but there wasn't enough time in the lesson. From looking at other group's openings I found that they're narratives were also good and very noirey. Compared to theirs, we've gone for the fast action-packed style noir with chases and fight scenes, whereas other groups have gone for a murderous deadly noir style with lots of blood and fem fatales. I also found that many groups had chosen music with lyrics that matched the action. Our music however doesn't have any singing in it as we entirely rely on the voice over, dialogues at the end and the different shots to tell the story. So overall I think other groups have produced work at the same standard as ours, but have used different codes and conventions to create a different style of neo-noir.