Evaluation - what have you learned from your audience feedback?

As our film was aimed at a younger generation, we decided to have an audience watch our final product that fit into this category because this would help us to know if the film we had created was successful in what we wanted to achieve overall. I asked a group of three friends between the ages of 16 - 18 to watch a give us some feedback on what they thought about it. They were able to give us positive comments and also some constructive criticism which enabled us to reflect back on our work and make some improvements according to what our audience thought. One of the first comments we had was:

"I really enjoyed the way you used daily life and turned it into a psychological horror basing it around mental illness because it was more relatable compared to some other horror movies I have seen because they are always very non naturalistic and exaggerated whereas yours shows exactly what someone with schizophrenia might go through everyday. I did like the way you also filmed some of the movie through the point of view of the character however I would say that because you also had some of the shots in third person as well it became a little confusing and not something I would usually see in a film like this but it was interesting to see it tried even if I think it didn't 100% work"

I was happy to hear that this person enjoyed the film and the difference there was in this horror compared to many others. I could see why they mentioned through constructive criticism about the point of view that the camera was in but after thoughts between me and my partner we decided to not change the whole film to suit that but take out and add in different parts to make the film run more smoothly and be less confusing for the audience members so they could understand the full meaning of the film. After all we needed this specific topic to be portrayed in the correct way because it is something that is currently being dealt with in todays society and we didn't want to affect the way people might react to it especially because its becoming more relevant in this generation. 

"I was entirely sure what the story was about at first because there was no dialogue but once the film had got going I started to understand the concept of schizophrenia because of the short flashes of disturbing images and clips"
Not including dialogue in our film was one of the ways we wanted to show how the character felt alone with no one to talk to. We decided to keep it this way because then the audience could see how isolated one person can feel by imaginary voices in their head and how frightening it would be if you had to live with this illness and not have someone to help you through it. To refer back to uses and gratification I would say that this film of course has a point to scare people but also to make people aware of the mental illess and that they have a say in how to deal with the situation and how to help people like the characacter in our story out because there is people in today's society trying to live with schizophrenia.