Audience

Although short films aren’t as dependent on audiences opinions and viewing figures like mainstream features. The audience still has a huge impact on short films, many shorts gain most of their viewers through word of mouth, and if someone didn’t enjoy the film, it would be unlikely they would recommend it to a friend. When we began planning confined we did think about what type of story would most appeal to audiences. But my opinion was that a short film is when people can be creative and suffer no consequences if it goes wrong. This did have a major impact on the way I began to create ideas about different types of short films.

I feel there are a number of ways in which confined interacts with its target audience; I would say that the main interacting is the relevance of the narrative to young adults and students. I believe this because thefts and attacks are very common amongst this age group, and many people feel threatened and worried about it happening to them. The film engages the audience because it shows away of how people deal with the aftermaths of attacks. The other way confined appeals to it target audience is the issues it deals with about fears, our film shows different situations where fears can affect people. I feel the main moral of the film is that everyone fears something in life, but you have to make sure that the fear doesn’t take over your life. Like our main character Sean.

To gain more feedback about how the film went and to get other people’s opinions we decided to create a questionnaire which would be handed out during a viewing of the of confined to a group of year 12 students. I feel this was a very beneficial exercise as it allowed us to see what other people thought about our piece. We decided that it would be important to ask questions about what appeal to the viewers and what could be improved. One of the main positives that came from the evaluation was that most of the people who took part in the questionnaire said they enjoyed the film and understood the narrative. One of the possible improvements which was suggested was that were maybe a bit repetitive in the use of effects throughout the film. Although we did use the effects to show a dream sequence and I felt that the effect gave the film stability and structure. During the editing period I feel that I was a bit blinded by the way the film was coming together, I feel that during that period I never critically looked at the film. I feel this was a big mistake as once I saw the final piece, I could see a number of mistakes and a huge amount of areas which could be improved. When I look at the final film for the first time I felt that other people wouldn’t understand the narrative of the film. But thanks to the questionnaire I was able to see that the majority of the audience understood the narrative and themes behind the film.

Over all I feel that the film was a success in area of audience. I feel that we managed to gain good feedback which has helped us to highlight possible improvements in the planning, edit and production. Although there are a number of improvements which could be made, I’m still very proud of what we managed to achieve. I feel that we took on a hard task of trying to convey a number of emotions in such a short space of time and with a limited amount of dialog. I also feel that our short film conformed to its genre of drama, but we did also take inspiration from avant guard and art house.