Initial Feedback from First Screening of "Shadows Present"

On Wednesday 1st April we asked two students from other groups to come and view our film opening. Unfortunately, I wasn't available for editing on this day, but fellow group members were there and did what they could without my opinions, and without my direction as the group Director. The two students who we selected hadn't seen "Shadows Present" (our opening sequence) before and didn't know what kind of content would be included within the storyline and plot. It was therefore a good test to see if our intended audience would understand the narrative, the representations of characters and the Noir style, as this understanding of the plot would be crucial had we intended on taking a whole film to a cinema screen. 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, disliked or thought needed improvements in our project so we could adapt our opening sequence on the basis of their feedback and comments. 

Laura

Laura liked the music choice and felt it was very Noir-style and worked well with the action on screen. She didn't, however, like the 'tumbler' transition we had applied to our titles. She liked the voiceover as it added tension to the narrative, and crucially she understood the narrative and felt there was a good enigma which we had created.

Kamal

Kamal had pointed out something we hadn't even noticed. He didn't like the hissing sound behind the voiceover and between the shots, and even gave us some advice on how to sort it out. He liked the different shots that we used, a mixture of wide shoits, close-ups and Dutch Tilts and the overall editing style. Interestingly, he didn't like the voiceover. He liked the ending, yet had a similar opinion to Laura's, and hated the 'tumbler' transition on the titles as it wasn't in his view in the style of a Noir film at all and seemed to ruin the atmosphere and tension that had been built throughout the sequence.

We had a week left until we'd have to finalise our sequence, so we 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' transitions we had recently applied to each of the titles. Chloe and Josh hadn't liked the tumbler transition in the first place, but agreed to allow Emily to keep it only if our audience liked it. From the their feedback we decided to erase the 'tumbler' transition and instead 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 ambience 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 fade out the hissing sound behind the voiceovers. This was a time consuming job but needed to be done because this had ruined the viewing experience for our audience.

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

Then, unfortunately there was a disagreement over the voiceover. Laura said she liked it and it made the film more in the style of a Noir film, but Kamal said he didn't like it and felt my voice didn't suit it. As a group we liked the voiceover and felt it added a more "Film Noir" 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 were thinking and what they would want to watch. 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, we found that their narratives were also good and very Noir-style. Compared to theirs, we've gone for the fast, action-packed style of Noir film with chases and fight scenes, whereas other groups have gone for a more murderous and deadly Noir style with lots of blood and femme fetales. We also found that many groups had chosen music with lyrics that matched the action. Our music however doesn't have any singing or lyrics in it as we entirely rely on the voiceover, the dialogues and exchanging of a couple of lines of speech at the end, and the different wide shots, close-ups and Dutch Tilts to tell the story. 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.