1. WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED
FROM YOUR AUDIENCE
FEEDBACK?
Danielle Ferrier

2.  Throughout the making of my documentary I received qualitative
feedback from my focus group, sixth form students and teachers.
 The first feedback I gained was after presenting my film proposal to my
focus group, overall I gained positive feedback and they thoroughly liked the
idea of my documentary. However one of the main concerns was the ethical
issues due to how personal the documentary was to my life, which then lead
to the question on where my documentary would be viewed. My focus group
also helped me to determine how I was actually going to present the conflict
in my documentary after they expressed their own opinions on what they'd
expect.

3.  I then next gained feedback once I created the rough cut, this was
presented to the other media students, my media teacher and head of sixth
form. Everyone filled out feedback sheets in order for it to be easier to
evaluate what they liked and what I had to improve. I was quite nervous
about the viewing of my rough cut as the topic makes me quite vulnerable,
yet everyone liked the intimacy and rawness of the footage. A few of the
feedback sheets stated that they would liked to of seen interviews with more
family members, which was an issue for me as quite a few family members
backed out at last minute as they didn't feel comfortable discussing
particular events.

4.  My focus group had seen the previous feedback sheets before watching
my final edit of the documentary. They liked the fact I had taken into
consideration some of the advice on how to improve it such as using
statistics based on divorce rates. Some also said that although having more
family views would of provided more information it shows the sensitivity
of the subjects and highlights that maybe there is a bigger effect than they
are aware of. But overall they all agreed that if it was made into a full
documentary that they would watch it as its something that a lot of people
could easily relate too. I showed my media class the final product and I
gained similar responses.

5.  Overall the feedback helped me to improve my documentary and showed
me how important it is to gain primary research. I didn't want to gain
feedback by posting my documentary on social sites as I wasn't comfortable
with displaying family events for anyone to see. By listening to the opinions
of others that i knew it allowed me to create a better documentary which I
am proud of, although its a vulnerable subject for me the fact that so many
people enjoyed watching it and were so enthusiastic made me feel more
comfortable about showing people.