WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

Danielle Ferrier

Throughout the making of my documentary I received

qualitative feedback from my focus group, sixth form

students and teachers.

The first feedback I gained was after presenting my film

proposal to my focus group, overall I gained positive

feedback and they thoroughly liked the idea of my

documentary. However one of the main concerns was the

ethical issues due to how personal the documentary was

to my life, which then lead to the question on where my

documentary would be viewed. My focus group also

helped me to determine how I was actually going to

present the conflict in my documentary after they

expressed their own opinions on what they'd expect.

I then next gained feedback once I created the rough

cut, this was presented to the other media students, my

media teacher and head of sixth form. Everyone filled out

feedback sheets in order for it to be easier to evaluate

what they liked and what I had to improve. I was quite

nervous about the viewing of my rough cut as the topic

makes me quite vulnerable, yet everyone liked the

intimacy and rawness of the footage. A few of the

feedback sheets stated that they would liked to of seen

interviews with more family members, which was an issue

for me as quite a few family members backed out at last

minute as they didn't feel comfortable discussing

particular events.

My focus group had seen the previous feedback sheets

before watching my final edit of the documentary. They

liked the fact I had taken into consideration some of the

advice on how to improve it such as using statistics based

on divorce rates. Some also said that although having

more family views would of provided more information it

shows the sensitivity of the subjects and highlights that

maybe there is a bigger effect than they are aware of. But

overall they all agreed that if it was made into a full

documentary that they would watch it as its something

that a lot of people could easily relate too. I showed my

media class the final product and I gained similar

responses.

Overall the feedback helped me to improve my

documentary and showed me how important it is to gain

primary research. I didn't want to gain feedback by

posting my documentary on social sites as I wasn't

comfortable with displaying family events for anyone to

see. By listening to the opinions of others that i knew it

allowed me to create a better documentary which I am

proud of, although its a vulnerable subject for me the fact

that so many people enjoyed watching it and were so

enthusiastic made me feel more comfortable about

showing people.