Rough Cut 2: Audience Feedback

We asked a group of teenagers, ages 16-17, to watch our rough cut and give feedback as it'd be useful to know what they think because they're in range of our target audience ( 15-25 ), then from this feedback we can see what worked and what didn't,  which we can then go on to make improvements to our film.

          

They thought the start worked well with the variable focus acting in away to provide narrative enigma with the killer's footsteps walking down the stairs. However, when it cuts from these steps down the stairs to the credits they noticed that the foot steps are not in time with the sound so we need to go back and edit this. Also the credits could do with some improvements so that they anchor the slasher genre because our audience didn't think they related to the genre, and at the end of these credits the title ' Black Nightmare'  is shown, but our audience thought that it was boring and didn't signify the genre so we'll have to edit this also and possibly add some special effects which signify the genre more.

Also our audience felt that some of the shots that we have are too long and that they loose the build up of tension , instead these long shots provide oppositional reading which is what we are not trying to provide instead we need preferred reading so we'll have to go back and edit these shots so that they're shorter. However they thought that the point of view shots from the killer's perspective in the bushes worked well and also provided the on going narrative enigma which is what we were aiming for, but the actually violent scene they thought could do with some adjusting because it was too long they thought so we'll go back and use shorter takes and include some fast pace editing, a good example of lots of takes and fast pace editing is the shower scene in Psycho ( Alfred Hitchcock ,1960 ) so we'll take influence from this and use it for out violent scene.



 Then they thought that the mise-en-scene for the killer's room worked well as the pictures on the wall gave the sense of this killer's stalking obsession with the victims, and also the blood on the killer's apron worked well along with his old black boots, however for the scene where the killer actually strikes his victim with the knife they thought it could of been faster and more aggressive as it doesn't look as scary it would if it was aggressive, also blood could of been used in this scene for the blows on the victim so we'll go back and re-shoot this scene.

And for the scene where the killer is chopping of the bits of meat our audience felt that he wasn't aggressive enough with the meat as a killer would normally be. Also the sound could of been more effective so make the audience feel uncomfortable, for example squelching of the meat when the killer handles it. So this will be another scene that we'll have to either go back and edit with the sounds or re-shoot.




These are clips of some of our target audience giving feedback...