We presented the finished film to a focus group so we could gain feedback as a group. The focus group contained of a group of around 10 people, i felt like this was a suitable amount of people so we could gain a good amount of feedback, and we could get a collective feedback.
The positive feedback that our film gained was re-occurring throughout the focus group was that we had good and smooth camera work, the characters and acting had a lot of positive feedback, especially the main character and how he had the look and feel, which represented what the audience wanted. Another repetitive comment that i found out was that the use of certain tracks and sound immerses you into the start of the film as well as creating feelings whilst watching it.
With any focus group you are looking for feedback, positive and negative, and like any other focus group ours was no different, there are aspects that they felt that could've been improved or changed. a point that kept appearing is that the audience did not think that the storyline was very clear, they didn't understand what was going on, and they saw that as negative feedback, but i saw this more a positive as we only did show the beginning of the film and if they understood straight away the rest of the film would render pointless, it created mystery and suspense which are some conventions of a thriller. However we did get a few comments in which that the zoom and dolly shot where kind of shaky which took you away from the film and seemed out of place.
My group contanited of three people, myself, Luke and Liam. As a group i feel like we worked very well post production and production wise. As any group we had a lot of discussions as everyone had their own opinion on how the intro should look, the way we resolved this was breaking down everyones idea and explaining what would work and what wouldn't, and because of this we combined the ideas and came up with a solution. I personally feel the group i was working with brought the best out in me, and even though our product could use improvements i don’t feel like i could've done any better with anyone else. During the Production of the film, i had the job of trying to visualize how the film would fit together and trying to get every shot that we would need for it to work, but with every task that we did, everyone had input which was extremely helpful. As a group we were always on top on what we had to do, we were quick and effective, we made sure that we had everything done with quality but quick. Overall i would work in the group again, and i reckon that the next product would turn out a lot better than our first.
In the way the opening scene turned out i am overall happy, the feel of the film suited in what we wanted, it creates that feel of suspense and mystery, and also how we edited the film helped convey moods. We did run into problems all throughout the production in that the eyepiece of the camera was not working so we had to rely on the LCD screen of the camera which in bright sunlight was not the best as we could not see the detail in the scenes. Even though we did have problems, and we used natural lighting and no professional lighting the overall look of the films works well.
Influence wise we looked a specific group of films, which were all low budget films that have been filmed in the UK, the reason for this is because this is what we wanted, we didn't want it to feel something that the film was never going to be. A main selection of films in what we looked at was Once Upon A Time in the Midlands and Dead Mans Shoes, but we did look at the style of Quentin Tarantino. You can see aspects of the films and style throughout the film. We wanted it also to look like a horror opening that and fast paced action opening.
