We got feedback from a fair few people, and we realised that some patterns emerged in what people were saying. See below all of our feedback comments:
Some of the most common things said were what we expected, e.g. background noise on some clips is quite prominent, the narration comes in too fast, some repetition. We knew when we finished our rough cut that some of these things would be said, as they were things we were not happy with ourselves. In response to these, we plan to edit our film best we can to improve it e.g. stabilise some clips, reduce the background noise, and add some more fades and transitions to slow down the narration. Without re-filming, we cannot get rid of some of the repetition of the questions asked/the answers. We would like to stay away from re-filming.
One or two people said they felt the film "dragged a bit". There is not really much we can do about this - documentaries are not everyone's cup of tea. Some suggested perhaps adding a plot twist at the end would keep interest. But we feel that adding a plot twist or drama strays us away from real documentaries that tell fact. We felt it would make our film look too staged and unrealistic.
Some of the good comments said most commonly that our shots were varied and interesting and most importantly, that we nailed the documentary style. One person even said it reminded them of Louis Theroux documentaries, who we used as inspiration. One or two people felt it could be shown on the BBC - which was quite the compliment.
We thought we would take one of the longer comments and go through each point;
This person has said they loved the opening shot - we found that a few people said that. Their second comment was that Jasper's voice was not all the same volume throughout the film. We expected this comment as the background noise in some clips is really loud, it competes with Jasper's voice. This is something we will attempt to fix by reducing the background noise in our editing software. on a similar note, the person has said some of the clips were shaky, while in some places it was the effect we were going for, in some places we could stabilise the video in order to keep the focus on what is happening. Again, this is something we will address when we improve our rough cut. It was also said that it was a bit "same-y" in terms of our questions. When watching it back, we felt similarly, but this is something we cannot fix without drastically cutting down our film/re-filming. The narration is said to start early, again this is something we knew we had to address and so we will add in a fade and a gap before the narration starts. This should make the film run more smoothly.
In terms of this person's good comments, they've said they liked the narration and how we have overlapped it with other clips. They also mentioned that we have definitely portrayed the conventions of documentaries, which was our main goal.
