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. Below is a picture of the questionnaire that we used in the first audience feedback.

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.

The second feedback we had was after we had almost completed the project. We uploaded a survey online for people to fill in and give their opinions on what they thought worked and what areas they felt it could improve upon. Acting on what we were told, we found that we should include an expert into the film to give it more credibility and inject more factual evidence into the documentary. As stated previously, documentaries can have a story to them, as ours does, but their main purpose is to educate and make the public think about subjects they might not have known about before.
Both of these audience feedback opportunities improved the quality and standard of our finished piece and due to their input gave us the opportunity to give our intended audience a project that better appealed to what they wanted out of a documentary of this caliber.