This blog post will detail some of the feedback I received when showing my work to others.

Once I felt like I had an edit that was worthy of being shown off, I exported it and sent a link to a couple friends, as well as showed my Mum the edit to get her opinion. From there I wanted to apply their feedback to the film to make it even better.

One of my friends was able to understand the story and plot quite easily. I thought that may have been because I had already discussed with her the documentary, but I had only told her one of the earlier structures I was working with. I was able to get a fresh pair of eyes by showing it to my Mum. She told me she didn’t understand it at first, but when she explained what she thought it meant, she was exactly right. She mentioned that she doesn’t tend to watch experimental stuff which is why she was confused, but I was happy to see that the message still got across.

My Mum also said that it “never shows the best part of my day”, as when the text comes up its just a black screen. I was confused as the footage throughout the whole thing was the best part, but she thought that I needed to reintroduce the shower at the very end to drive it home. After listening to her I really agreed, I think that I never showed the shower in the last minute of the piece so it felt like it kind of slipped into the background a little too much. After watching it with adding the shower in at the very end again, I think it works really well just to help the audience feel a little less confused and be certain that the shower is the main point.

One of my friends was a little confused on the effects at first. While watching it she asked “why is it out of focus?” because she thought that “why would you ever want to have blurry footage in your film?”. She had never really experienced experimental film so when I explained that to her and what the effects represented, it seemed to click for her. However this reaction means that I think I should make the disintegration of the footage take longer. I think it started off too blurry that it seemed like an accident, so I will drop down those effects a little bit on the earlier clips.