Note: This feedback video was made alongside Beatrice Douaihy, another member of my group, and she will also be using it for her evaluation.
The one thing I'm happy about is that they mention they liked the lack of dialogue. This is in contrast to our focus group, who said they wanted dialogue, and is something I personally preferred, so I'm relived it was liked.
The music had mixed responses, which is understandable. Personally I liked it, but I do agree that sound design as a whole could have been better. The song tends to overbear other sounds, such as the wind effects.
They all talk about how they wanted to know what would happen, and how they got very little from the piece, which is an indication we did what we wanted by making it very enigmatic; some even mistaking which character was good and which was bad.
They also reacted positivity to the genre hybrid, which is good, as previous attempts at this have been unsuccessful (the short lived 2001 television series Firefly for example,) and it is a relief that they responded well.
People seemed rather impressed by the planet, which was good, as this took me a long time and felt a little off to me. I didn't think it looked particularly good and was worried people wouldn't understand it or think it was out of place.
There was a compliment on editing, which I felt was its weakest point. personally, I thought many shots weren't cut quite right, but the positive reactions probably means that my criticism is more because I spent so long watching it during editing.
The criticisms are mostly fair, however it is a shame they felt that it was over-long, as that was one of the main things we tried to go for. It may just be that the changing attitudes towards films and action makes the long takes of a classic western less accessible to a modern audience.
Overall, i think that our product was successful. We achieved the enigmatic feel we had hoped to from the beginning, as well as successfully showing the genre hybrid, and people seemed to enjoy the piece, which achieves our hopes of a 'popcorn-flick' type of film.
