Class feedback from film

What do you like about our movie and please give feedback on things we can improve .... These are a few answers I got

'I liked the non diegetic music as it had a real cinematic effect. The quality was really good, and the colours, and fading of voices, intrigued me. I really enjoyed it and it was really creepy. I would have loved to see more.' I then asked if I was going to give some feedback on how to improve what would you say. 'would alter the voices too make them sounds more similar, as it sounds like more than one person, when it was supposed to be one.'
They also said that they liked how the suspense built up with the music. When it was at the climax, the music got to the loudest point, which enhanced the tension.
Another thing that a lot of people liked was at the beginning it was obvious I was in the car, due to the diegetic sound effect of the car and the light fading across my face showing I was in the boot of a car and the light symbolised other cars going past and street lights.
They said they liked the font. We were happy they said this as we had tried so hard to make it perfect.
They liked how at the end of the film we zoomed into the machinery, and that it was powerful.

Overall the feedback is very positive. I conducted a small survey asking 35 people to give their honest rating of my movie from 1 to 10 (10 being an amazing film), and asked them what they liked about the movie and what they would change. 

7 of the questioned people where aware of the synopsis to the film but the rest weren’t. The questioned people composed of:

• 4 close friends
• 3 family members
• 3 school teachers (2 of them teaching media)
• 5 people from my target audience
• 8 mutual friends
• 8 friends of friends 
• 4 strangers

Here are the results:

Then I asked them what they liked about the movie overall, the summary of what they all said is:

They really liked the colours, they said that "the colours are aesthetically appealing". 

They mentioned how the camera angles used in the film were very creative and helped tell the story better. 

A lot of the people mentioned how they where very curious to find out what happens to her next, and wanted to watch more. 

They all said that they really liked the music as well as the audio used in the movie, one of the teachers said that "it really suited the film". 

The voice acting was liked by most, no one said that they didn't like the quality of the voice acting and no one mentioned anything about the story being to confusing or hard to understand.

My target audience really like the cinematography and tension within the film, 3 of them said they were on their toes throughout the whole film. They also really enjoyed the finale and found it to be very effective, one of them said "when the camera shook I got shivers". 

Then I asked what they think I should change about the film, the summary of what they said is:

9 people said they think the opening shots were Love is on the floor and moves her head up should be angled different, most suggested that the camera should be closer to her or at a different point of view. I agree with their feedback and will improve on that in future projects. 

The people who did not know of the synopsis said that the voices were too similar and not distinct enough from each other. However, i then explained to them that that was intentional, some stuck with their statement, and some understood and found my intended effect to be very intriguing.

A lot of the viewers also mentioned how it did not make sense how Love got up immediately after she was confronted by Autem, they assumed she would be too scared to get up after what happened to her. However, I explained to them that in the Longer cut there is a scene where she experiences a panic attack directly after he leaves, she gets up to eventually confront him back. That scene was eventually cut out because of time saving reasons. They then understood the situation.

To finish off the feedback and to get a full scope of what people think of our opening sequence, Libby and I decided to present the film to our class mates to see what they think of it, this is their feedback: 




Conclusion:

To conclude I think the movie was an overall success, I, personally, am very proud with the final outcome. It is my first ever film, and I know I put the most possible amount of effort I could put into its creation, considering the film making experience, time, and resources I had to work with. I would personally rate my film at an 8 or 9, because, even though in a whole the film is very good, I can still think of many ways it could be improved, especially in the aspects of cinematography (camera angle, camera work, etc.) and clarity of story telling, and for any future projects those aspects will be the two things I will be keenly looking out for to improve and develop on.

Evaluation 7

Evaluation 6

Evaluation 5

How have you attracted/addressed your target audience 

Movie posters

• When creating my movie poster, I had an image in my head of what I wanted it to look like. Our film is centred around colour and therefore I wanted to incorporate that in my poster. There are 3 main aspects of our film. The vulnerable naive girl, the psychotic man, and the interesting props we used to convey fear such as the roses, and the Styrofoam heads. 
• I thought of many ideas but there were my 3 favourites….

1. First idea - My first idea was to do a close up of girls eyes and have a reflection of the male character in her eye. I think this would have created mystery. The background would have been black to create danger.
2. Second idea - A shot of a plain styrofoam head with a red rose stuck in its mouth, with different colours reflecting onto the face.
3. Third idea - Another idea was a a rose pedal mid-air falling towards a water puddle, with the roses from the film in the reflection. I thin this would have been simple but effective at the same time.

My favourite idea was number 2 because I think it represented the full idea of my movie, and I could experiment with different frames and colours, with the heads.

Fina chosen image

We experimented with a lot of angles and colours, and these were a few of our outcomes. The last one was our favourite. I thought the angle was really good, as the from the front view, you can see more and it looks more creepy as it looks like the man is staring at you in the face. I also thought the colour was perfect in this shot. Half of it is red and the other half is blue. I think this represents the feelings, and this image is a lot deeper and holds a lot more than it looks like.

We edited it on Photoshop CC, which is used for creative use and we wanted to take full advantage of this. In the scene of the male character speaking the colours were red and green, so we decided to adjust the colours, to match. What we did is we digested the tone, the gamma, the exposure, the saturation and the contrast which improved the image massively. We wanted to perfect the poster, as its the first thing you see even before the movie, therefore expectations are going to be made even even before the audience watch it. We wanted it to be creative, interesting and eye catching and I think we achieved this. 

When asking people for feedback, they said that they thought the title was too distracting. Therefore using the curve tooI I started to adjust the title and resulted with a more purple result. We re-showed the class and they loved it, and so did I.  

This demonstrates the fact that our target audience of 15 years plus, were attracted and addressed through our poster. By featuring very little about the actual film, but making it seem that it was dark and onimous we were able to connote that our film was a horror. In addition the way in which the character is in the middle, with their mouth covered and there eyes shut, we were able to symbolise a menacing aspect to our film which was further evoked through the merging of the 2 colours red and green. The covering of the mouth was also used to symbolise along with the blurring of the colours the fact that our character had mental health issues. With the red colour being dominant this showed that the evil side of the characters personality, was more in control. The way in which the colours are hazy, and blur into the face we also felt evoked a cinematic effect, and made it looked like our character was walking through a dream, which was also was supposed to symbolise his bipolar personality. The fact that the character has no hair and his eyes are shut and his skin is shaven gives the character a robotic look and infers they are empty inside,  which was also further symbolising the multiplying layers of the characters personality. 

As well as this are casting choices and our use of mise-en-scene also targeted our target audience and addressed them.

In our opening scene, we used a variety of different things to help attract our target audience. We therefore thought long and hard about the way we wanted the actors to be perceived. We also thought about the type of diegetic and non diegetic music we needed to include, as well as the location it was set.

The first thing we thought about what the location. We wanted to make it in an interesting area, that would be intriguing, and therefore bring people in to watching it. We didn't want to do it in a relatable place, as we thought that would be boring, and typical, and as our theme for our opening scene is very unusual we wanted to match it with a great unusual place. 

We thought about doing it in 

• Park 
• House 
• School 
• Prison like room 
• Grave yard 

However we weren't satisfied with out options, so we kept researching, when finally we found a 

perfect place, which was a real life prison that was being renovated. We knew that man that owned it and so we thought it was perfect to film our opening sequence there. 

We asked people what they thought of the locations and the ones they thought would interest them the most. 

The results came back like this…

1. Prison like room 
2. Grave yard
3. School
4. Park
5. House 

From these results we can conclude, that the most usual places, were the least popular. We asked a couple of the participants that filled out the sheet why and they said it was because they were the most expected and in a thriller you want mystery. Another person said if you want to attract people to watch something, you need to do something that will make people excited and scared to watch it. 

The most popular answer was, prison like room. We again asked a few of the participants why this would attract them the most to watching our film. One of them said, that its because its in an unusual setting. They wouldn't want the film, to be somewhere they go everyday, as that defeats the suspense of thriller, and already gets rid of the effect of mystery.

The next thing we thought about was the characters. We wanted to have female, and male characters in out thriller, to have both genders wanting to watch it. Our Primary audience was … We decided to have a teenage girl, as this would attract the female audience as they could relate to someone like them, however it would also affect the male gender, as they could be attracted to the female character. When researching, and asking people for their opinions, a lot of males, said that they were more likely to watch the film if the female character was attractive. A lot of things that attract people to thrillers violence or aggression, and we portrayed this through our choice of male character. We made him be aggressive towards the female.  This would therefore affect our primary target audience. 

My Actor is a teenage girl, she is similar to other characters in other movies such as Selena gomez, and drew barrymore in scream.

My male character is an older man, he is also similar to other characters in other movies such as Antony Hopkins in silence of the lamb and Kevin spacey in seven.

This is a shot of our main actress. Her facial expressions look extremely terrified. I think this picture would get the audience attentions for different reasons. To begin with, our actresses face is very dark, which gives a miserly vibe.It reveals how scary and dangerous the film can be. I think this will catch the audiences attention and make our genre more evident as a thriller horror as it creates suspense an tension.

This is shot from, a different view, you will see in the movie. It is our actress sitting in the car, as she has been kidnapped. However in the actual movie, you will only see a close up of her eye, and car sounds which will make it easier to understands she is in a car. In this scene it is dark which has connotation of danger and violence. The whole seen is black and this creates suspense and mystery.

Evaluation 4

About any perfect target audience member.

This page above indicates the target audience, we are aiming at. This boy is a normal teenager, who goes to school, and is active on social media. He is in education studying his A levels, and his hobbies include going skate boarding and playing guitar. When he finishes school, he wants to go to university and study media and film and then go into the film industry.As he is active on social media, he has been able to see our trailer we posted on Facebook, which is great, as it shows that our ways of distributing are aimed at things our target audience, are doing on a day to day bases - Like going on facebook. Our film is a thriller, and therefore more boys are attracted to it, however our second target audience is teenage girls, the boys may go with their girlfriends to watch the film, which will increase our target audience even more.

Why would he like my film?

I think he would like our film because he is in the perfect age range. We were aiming at around 17-30. We wanted teenagers to enjoy our film, because we thought they could relate, and when doing a survey about what films people liked most, teenagers responded highest to thrillers. Jay Adams is studying media right now, and then wants to further carry on his education of media at university, that is why we thought he would enjoy our film as he is into film and technology. Jay likes music, and likes playing electric guitar, which is associated with punk and rock music. The stereotypical teenage boy that likes rock music would also like dangerous thriller films. Jay also likes playing video games such as ‘call of duty’, which also have association with danger, which relate to my film. Therefore I think that Jay Adams is our perfect target audience member

We decided on 17-30 years of age due to our survey and charts we made. We thought that 17-30 was a not to large of a spectrum for our target audience. We thought that people younger than 17 would get to scared by the content of a thriller, and people older than 30 get the thrill out of out movie as much as people younger, therefore that is how we decided to choose our range in target audience.

To officially decide our genre, we needed to ask 30 members of our target audience as to what type of thriller they want to see, we explained to them what the story is about and showed them the Storyboard V2.0, here are the results:

Again, I went to a list found on IMDB, of the top 20 best Phycological Thriller films (at time of writing):

Here is a definition of what a Target Audience is:

‘A particular group at which a product such as a film or advertisement is aimed’. 

Based on this information we research on IMDB we discovered that films which we were based similar to ours, had the majority target audience of 18-29. I also wanted to do this target audience as, it this age range is the most accessible to me, with students within this age range at my school, therefore I have access, for people to watch it, feedback, and input to what they would enjoy. Teenagers are still developing and finding themselves, therefore I think that the viewers will be able to relate to the girl actor. They could understand her emotional state and sympathise with her. Therefore I think I have chosen my target audience wisely and looked at all possible outcomes.

SECONDARY TARGET AUDIENCE 

We knew that our secondary target audience would be a female teenager. 

Video explanation 

I wanted to do a video, explaining what typical teenage boys, do on a day to day basis, and some of their thoughts on questions that I thought were suitable to this task. One thing that I have picked up on is how popular the app snapchat is. Everyone is using it, to communicate through video, pictures and public stories that all your friends can see. I thought it would be a good way to show our target audience, through one of the things they do most - which is Snapchat. The people I interviewed, were boys aged 16-18. They all had an interest in thriller movies, and playing football. I asked one the boys - “What do you like most about thrillers” They replied “The thing I like most about thrillers is that there is a thrill factor, you don't get with other films, like silly comedies and stupid horror”. Taking this answer into consideration and linking it to my opening sequences, I think we successfully did portray the thrill factor and have some tense moments in our movie. I found out why people like the beginning of a thriller film, to be good. This is because it makes you want to carry on. You don't want to give to much away, and then the audience member will want to find out more. He also set it introduces the characters. This is what we were aiming for, when making our opening scene. We wanted to introduce, the girl character as vulnerable and naive and the male character as dominant and powerful.

evaluation 3

Evaluation 2

Evaluation 1

Final Movie - Faceless

 

Voice Recording days

We want Autem to have a range of personalities, each will have to have its own unique voice/tone to keep it realistic, because people with this condition are known for adjusting their vocal tone/range to match the personality they are embodying. So, we will need to add the dialogue post filming. And a good friend of mine, his name is Michael, has a recording studio. I asked to more friends of mine, who have two different kinds of voices, to come and voice act as the personalities. Danny, will be the lighter toned mid voice of Autem’s Happy personality, and Moshe will be the darker toned deep voice of Autem’s Anger personality. Danny is a professional actor, Moshe is the dad of my other friend who came to help me on filming day 4 (he is not a professional actor of any sort, he just has a really cool natural deep voice). 

Day 1: 

Me, Yehuda and Danny, and Moshe all showed up at Michael’s studio at around 5:30 pm. We began with me giving a detailed briefing of what the movie is about, the scenery, the atmosphere of each scene, what I am expecting and wanting from the voice actors, and what Michael should be recording. I forgot to print out copies of the script so we used my laptop. We went through the script starting with Autem 1 (Anger Autem/Moshe), since he was the main voice actor of the film. Like Jonathan, Moshe is not a professional actor so we had a quite a few takes with him, around 185. We read through each line however many times until both me and Yehuda were satisfied with how it sounded. After around 45 min, we moved on to Autem 2 (Happy Autem/Danny). And then we ended with me doing some recording of her breathing, so we could overlay it on the opening shots and other parts throughout the film.

Overall, the experience was very fun and taught me a lot about the sound industry, Michael has been a sound mixer for over 24 years, he taught me a lot about what processes go into just making the sound and music of a film, he taught me about ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement), and that the average licensing price for a song in a feature movie is around £40,000 if the movie is screened in a certain country/continent only, but for an international movie it can easily cost around £200,000.

Here are some sample from the recording day and videos too:

 

Day 2:

After presenting the audio to a few friends, family, and some classmates, I got the same consistent feedback. “Moshe doesn’t sound authentic enough, as if he is reading directly from a script”. So, we had to re-record his lines. The reason I chose him originally was because he has a powerful, deep, (beautiful, if I may add) natural voice, that contrasts very well to Danny’s, they have a very similar base tone to their voices. To Moshe’s defence, he is a businessman, not a voice actor, therefore I wasn't so surprised when I got the feedback. Since I already knew a very good voice actor, I invited back Danny to record at Michael’s studio again, but this time he will be the Anger voice. We thought up a new tone for Autem, we made him sound a bit angry and hurt in his angry voice. That can help add a new dimension to who Autem is as a person. We finished after around 40 min, and around 30 takes. 

The second problem I encountered was the breathing pace that we recorded in Day 1 with myself, did not match the breathing pace we had in the footage that we recorded.  We decided to use Yehudas sister to do the breathing instead. This is around the time where I finished selecting the footage that we wanted to use from all the filming days, so we placed a screen in front of his sister with the raw footage playing in a slideshow type of form, where it cycles from one shot to the next. She breathed for each shot continuously and had a 5 second pause between each shot. We finished after around 30 min and around 5 re-tries. 

I then took all the new audio and presented it again to my friends, family, and classmates and got much better feedback, they said that if Danny’s Anger voice could be lowered a bit, just to help distinct between the two personalities. 

Here are some photos and a video:

A picture of a cool chair and guitar I found next door

Extra filming days

Filming Day 3: 

After referencing back to our Storyboard Schedule, we decided to film all the shots that required just me as I was acting. This included Shots that involved the corridor and the main room. This was a very fun and smooth day, since learning from our previous filming mistakes, we managed to plough through many of the shots, and even added some creative flair to some. Yes, we did have a lot of retakes, but that’s expected with first time film makers (we took around 71 takes). The corridor shots were a little complex because the lighting would tend to reflect of the wall to brightly, leaving a visual bright circle on the wall and other times, because of the corridors narrowness, the brightness of one colour would overpower the other, leaving a strange blend of colour. So, a lot of adjusting had to be made throughout filming. We filmed for around 3-4 hours, everything was not done yet, we had a few shots left, however, it was getting late so we left. 

Filming Day 4:

I was not able to arrive on that day, so Yehuda took it as an opportunity to film all the yellow shots, since they required no actors. He asked a friend of mine to go and assist because there were a lot of props to carry and move around. This was the day where he finally used the wood planks and Styrofoam heads. But before that part we had to film some roses, and the water drop shots, When I arrived we also used this as an opportunity to film some shots of the location. We went back to the room, placed the roses on the stool, filled a cup with water from a toilet sink nearby and started dripping water on the roses, in turn, creating a puddle on the floor underneath. I then used a macro lens to film the drips of water landing in the puddle. From there we moved on to the shots of Autem’s office. We scouted around a bit and eventually found a perfect room right around the corner from where the main room was at. My friend ended up having to leave. It was filled with construction items and other materials, which I decided to just keep there and use in the movie. After around 30 min of organising and rearranging I started filming. Around an hour later, I got all the shots needed. 

It was a good learning experience to be on my own, it made me resourceful with the props found around the location, and gave me freedom to create the room how I would imagine Autem would layout his office. 

Filming Day 5:

The final filming day, the day I put my ‘serious director’ hat on. Originally, I was meant to film 2 days earlier, but complications occurred with the filming location and we had to postpone the filming day. Filming day 5 is the Blue shot days. The day we needed Jonathan, my 6 ft. 7 in. family friend who kindly came back to finish filming the movie. He came on the first filming day too, but none of the footage was used of that day. It was a stressful day; a lot of retakes were done on this day. I wanted to perfect everything since this was the last time we will be coming to this location, let’s just say we ended up with around 120 takes. This day was work intensive and took a total of 4-5 hours to finish. However, all the results ended up to my expectation and I was very happy with what I got. 

I learned a lot from this day, especially on how to work under the pressure of time and malfunctions. Right on the last day of filming, the lights in the main room decided to not turn off for some odd reason, so we had to turn off the lights for the whole corridor from the fuse box, however, there were overtime construction workers working at the end of it, who needed the lights. We kindly asked them if we could turn off the lights, thy eventually said yes, but they gave us 40 min, and walked off to have their break. And on top of that, Jonathan is not a professional actor, therefore he needed a little more takes and patience, but he put his full effort resulting, in some very good takes to end up using in our final film.