John Boocock - Critical Evaluation Question 3

What we learned from audience feedback.

Audience feedback was present from the very start of our production and we tried to work and improve upon everything that was commented on and critiqued about our project.
In the research stage, we set up a simple questionnaire to ask a sample of the target audience (Young Adults aged between 17-25) to give us feedback on what they thought of our initial idea of creating a documentary about teen fathers and how they would react if they saw it. We uploaded this video to YouTube and a link to it can be found here:



With this information, we shaped our previous ideas considerably. We were originally aiming to give a parody documentary in the style of 'This is Spinal Tap' or 'Come Fly with Me', however after the feedback, we found that it would be a much better idea to tackle this sensitive subject seriously rather in a humorous way. Our audience would not react well to a serious subject being treated as a joke.
We also conducted additional feedback in a conversation with Sue, the representative at the Barnsley College Health and Wellbeing Centre, who told us that while there was a vast amount of information available towards teenage mothers, there was very little that was available to focus on teen fathers. We reorganized our intentions to include teenage fathers into the intended audience. A big part of the documentary is that it must be educational and bring awareness to a particular issue within society that audiences may not have thought of before. This thought was backed up in the interview we had with the audience sample.

From the feedback, we learned that we had to broaden the scope of our audience as our target audience would have been made wider than we had initially thought. We also learned that people tended to want their information delivered by an expert to give it more authority and credibility than if it was delivered by another of our characters. And finally, we learned that a delicate issue that has a gap in the market should be taken seriously. It would be more appealing to an audience if it was taken seriously by the filmmakers and presented in a way that would be both touching and realistic, both as a drama and as an educational piece on the subject.