Audience Feedback Overall - Laura

After putting the 4^th flashback up onto Facebook, we got a text from one of our viewers saying that they thought they had spotted a continuity error, where the frying pan had changed colour from when Sam had got it down to when Amy picks it up. However, this is just because the frying pan is black on top, and silver on the bottom, so here are some pictures to prove it is not a continuity error!

Rather then just posting sections of our clip onto Facebook then having people post about it, we also got verbal feedback. Yesterday while I was editing, one of my peers, Toby Thomas came and sat with me so that he could comment on the nearly-finished film.

I asked him to watch it through once first to get his initial criticisms.

- He said that our foley audio at the end where Sam is crying, we had a foley of Mark crying overtop, Toby said that this was not needed as the tension is already heightened through the other elements of representation, such as the way it switches to low key lighting when Sam is sitting in the living room

- He also originally did not understand the bathroom scene where Sam is looking in the mirror, as he could not see what the item that Sam gets out of the cupboard. Unfortunately, we did not have a close up shot revealing it is concealer, however after we had put the college scene into the sequence, we showed Toby again and he said it was much clearer

- Finally, he also said the idea for the film was unrealistic, saying that there are “no cases of domestic where the man is the victim”. This was one criticism that we were not going to consider, however, and after showing Toby the blog posts of our domestic abuse research, he in the end had to agree.

- He liked the film overall though, and he especially liked the credits sequence. Saying it was a simple idea that worked really well, as it did not detract from the film.

Then I made changes to certain parts of the film to see which one he preferred. These were mainly changes with the audio as this is one of the parts we were having most difficulty with.

-         Originally we stopped the soundtrack when Sam gets into the car as we were going to have the radio come on at the point of the news headlines. We were going to have a report about domestic abuse, where there is a female victim. However, we decided not to use this in the end as no violence had been introduced by this point so we thought it would make it too obvious for the audience, rather than them gradually working it out through the flashbacks. As we decided to not include a report, we decided to extend the soundtrack to the shot of the tyre when Sam is driving off. Toby agreed that this was a good place to stop, as the lyrics in the song had started by then, so we did not want it to detract from the diegetic dialogue when Sam talks in the car.

-         The parts between the flashbacks have no dialogue, and so we decided to put the soundtrack over these. However, we used Toby as an audience to tell us how loud he thought they should be. Eventually we thought -19 was a good level, so that the audience is not distracted by the lyrics.

We finished the entire film today (22nd January 2013), so I decided to get some post-production feedback from one of my peers, Gavin Wallace. Things that I noticed while he was watching it...
- He liked, similarly to Toby, the opening shot where we see the credits on the phone
- He said that the action where Sam stabs the microwave meal shows his "rage", making the reader question what it is from; later finding out it is suppressed anger from being domestically abused.
- He noticed from the big close up of the phone when Sam gets in the car that there were already "9 missed calls from Amy", and that she was already appearing "clingy", furthered with way she continually calls Sam throughout the day.