Question Three

What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

We had two focus groups and during the first pre-production focus groups we showed our plans for the short film and both print products, movie poster and review. In the first focus group majority of the class approved our ideas and they favoured the way we wanted to build our print products and short film. However we received a suggestion from the audience regarding the amount of stereotypes which we were intending to use. Therewere too many stereotypes included within our short film. Initially we intended to have an African, English and Indian stereotype within our film. The English stereotype would be when he is dressed all smart and tries to act English and professional in public to try and fit in due to the reason he is from another country the English stereotype would be portrayed in his smart wear dressing. We also wanted him have a bubbly and live character and this would be an African stereotype. We wanted him to be loud as some African stereotypes suggest. Lastly the Indian stereotype would be used in the day dream which he has on the train where he sees the beautiful girl. In the day dream the Indian stereotype comes in the day dream where they dance with each other and act overly romantic as most Indian films have in their scenes. We also included a romantic Indian song in the background to show that we used Indian stereotypes during that scene. However as said before a member of the class believed that there was too many stereotypes being used and that this will cause confusion to the audience. so my group and me all pondered over the feedback we received and came to a decision that we’ll take out a stereotype because later on we realised that they were right and having too many stereotypes would create difficulty for us and it might be too much for the audience they might not understand it.

On our second focus group we displayed to the classroom our print products, our short film poster and our magazine review. The classroom showed to us that they liked how everything looked and they thought there were many aspects within our magazine review and movie poster which they liked. In our movie poster they said that they likedthe splashes in the movie poster, they thought it was eye catching and the way the splashes include some important parts in the film, it acts like a taster to the audience by seeing these splashes they would be interested in seeing the film so it grabs audience's attention. They also liked how we used bits of features from our case studies and how the features we tried to use clearly showed on our poster. The splashes were one of the features we tried to use and we got this feature from our east is east, we also wanted the film name to be underneath the main image as though he is standing on it and we also got this from east is east. Mr Bean was another case study which we used. In the Mr Bean movie poster, his main character shows a funny pose which match with the comedy which the audience will see in the film and we were very much aspired by this technique so we used it and the feedback we received about this was that it was successful.  Another one of our case studies was west is west, and we loved the tag line which was used in the movie poster ‘same family different country’ and we wanted to use the same order of the phrase. We wanted to have ‘same Monty different country’ in our own movie poster and the feedback we received was that some of them thought that it did work and that it made sense, so they didn’t mind the tag line they thought it was fine however others believed that the tagline didn’t make sense because ‘same Monty different country’ means that the audience have seen him before and there is a sequence of films in which he stars in where as this is the first time we see him in a film, so some of the feedback we received was that it didn’t make sense, so me and my group again thought over it and at the end we changed the tag line to ‘are you ready London its… Monty’s day out’ we thought this was much better so we were pleased.

In relation to the movie review, we hadn’t finished making it when we presented the pitch to the class so we just elaborated on our ideas. And the main focus of the movie review was about the still image that we were going to use. And we wanted to use more than one image in our review as we found in our research most of the reviews have more than one still image for example the movie review on Skyfall had more than one image. So the class thought this was fine to use but when the teacher asked what was the most memorable part of the film they suggested the scene where he is eating the biscuit because it was really funny and the part where the main character Monty was with the girl. Initially we wanted to use this still image but once we put it up it didn’t look like a comedy genre it looked more like a romantic film so we changed it and decided to put up a still image of where he looks really confused and where his looking straight at the security guards when he reaches the olympic games. this seems like his looking straight at the audience. so this will build a fake relationship with the audience thus getting them to carry on reading.