LO4: Audience Feedback (Focus Group and Survey)

Focus Group

• Loud, unbalanced dialogue during Living Room scene and Ava's Interrogation scenes
• Gunshot is far too loud
• Very quiet dialogue in end scene

Online Questionnaire/ Survey

During the feedbacking and improving stage of creating my short film, I ran a focus group and online questionnaire. The reason I ran both is not only so I could get more feedback, but also because running a focus group allowed the audience to hear the foley, sound effects and music in a higher quality than they would be able to on their phones or laptop while answering a questionnaire. I wanted to gain audience feedback and suggestions, because throughout the post-production of this short film, I spent multiple hours editing and re-editing the same sequences, and having an audience watch and listen to my short film helped me to pick up on different flaws and get suggestions relating to how I could improve the short film. For example, as visible in the questionnaire results and my focus group notes above, I was told numerous times that there is unbalanced audio where it goes from really quiet to really loud. I have detailed below the methods I used to respond to the constructive criticism that arose in my focus group and online questionnaire.

Loud, Unbalanced Dialogue

There were multiple scenes containing Ava that had some loud and overly unbalanced dialogue. To fix this, I went through all the dialogue and set each one to a reasonable volume. I then selected all of the dialogue and opened the audio workspace.

In the audio workspace, in the Essential Sound panel I assigned it as 'dialogue' and pressed auto balance. This feature brings all of the audio levels of the selected tracks to a balanced level which can be finetuned to preference afterwards.

Gunshot Is Too Loud

This was a simple issue to fix, all I needed to do was right click on the sound effect in the timeline and select 'Audio Gain.' From there, I lowered the audio gain making the sound effect quieter.

Very Quiet Dialogue in End Scene

This was a similar fix to the gunshot sound effect, I simply right clicked on the dialogue clip in the timeline and selected 'Audio Gain.' From there, I increased the audio gain to make the dialogue louder.

I was also able to find out about the successful elements within my film so that I can take that knowledge into future projects. For example, a member of the focus group said that the sound effects I chose made sense where they were and had been appropriately applied.