Screening to our media class

Today all groups showed their finished film noir sequences to the rest of the media class. This was so we could gain feedback from our potential target audience (aged 15-25) and to compare our sequences to other groups. For many people in our class, this was the first time they'd seen our film opening and didn't know the full synopsis of what our film was about. Therefore it was useful to gain feedback from them as they were watching our film under the same circumstances as our target audience would if they went to see it. Feedback is a great way of understanding people's reactions and finding out ways of improving to suit the audience. Below I've listed things that people liked and disliked about our film:

• Forms and conventions: ECMS

Editing: They liked the title font and how the 'Shadows Present' title at the end gradually changed to red before blurring away. They felt the pace was very noirey but some people felt the distinguish between flashbacks and present time was confusing at points and could have been made clearer. To resolve this we would have either applied a noise or transition effect that triggered the audience were going into a flashback, or putting all flashbacks in black and white formatting.

Cinematography: They felt a good variety of interesting shots were used and they particularly liked the tracking shots when the man is opening the package. However many people felt that a shot of the dead body at the beginning would have established that someone had died and made it more clearer to the audience. The class particularly picked-up on the shot where Chris is shot at an angle with half the desk slicing through the screen. They liked this shot and said it made the film more modern and interesting, which we were pleased to hear as this was just a quick shot we'd done from an obscure angle and had no intention of including it. But we're glad we did because it left a certain impact on our audience.

Mise-en-scene: They liked the way the characters were dressed and felt it made them look older. They also liked how the villain was dressed completely in black clothing, as this gave connotations of danger and death. They liked the woods location and felt it worked well with the running scenes, and they liked the way the studio was dressed to look like an office.

Sound: They liked the music and felt it added a noir style atmosphere to the scenes. They also liked the pleonastic sound effects as they added tension and made it seem like Chris was lonely. Many people also liked the church bells playing at the beginning and felt they also added dramatic tension.

• Characters and iconography

People liked the characters and understood the different roles they played within the film. They felt the characters represented young people aged slightly older than us (late teens/early 20's) and also how they represented traditional noir style characters too e.g. Chris played the confused man who's got into trouble and involved with the wrong person, and Josh played the mysterious villain who's out with a deadly ambition to get Chris. However the audience noticed no fem-fatales featured in our film, though this doesn't make it any less of a noir because not all noirs feature fem-fatales in the opening.

• Narrative

The class liked the narrative idea and felt many aspects of it were of he noir style, however many people didn't understand entirely what was going on, and felt the narrative was quite difficult to follow throughout the film, maybe because we'd been too ambitious about fitting too much into a short time scale. To make this clearer we would have focused on on or two key points in the storyline and not tried to over-complicate things with too many different enigmas going on at once. The audience felt the enigmas were good and would keep them watching, but perhaps too much was left un-answered and left them questioning too much instead of focusing what was actually going on. The majority of the class didn't like the dialogue and voice-over though. They liked the idea of having a voice-over as it fits within the noir style, but felt they couldn't understand what Chris and Josh were talking about because it was too 'flowery' and metaphorical. We wrote our speech in this particular way to exaggerate on the traditional noir way of speaking, but to overcome the issue we could have written it to be more understandable and appealing to our target audience.

• Audience

The class felt they enjoyed watching our film sequence and would want to watch the rest of our film, but the speech would probably make it more appealing to older people (20's ish) instead of the younger half of our target audience. This is fine for us as we would still appeal to our target audience, but could have made it more appealing to younger people as well by tweaking the speech and making it understandable for all ages in our target range.

• Within the noir genre?

The class agreed that our film was within the noir genre as many codes and conventions were addressed. They liked the running scenes and felt the studio scenes were particularly noirey. They felt the characters and locations represented the noir genre well and liked the use of shadows to illustrate the presence of a new character. They also liked the fast action against slow paced music and felt that worked well to create a tense atmosphere.

Overall the class enjoyed our film and said our film was definitely within the noir genre. We have fulfilled the brief and even with a few things we could have made clearer, the end result was still good.