Audience view of newspaper shot

We asked a few people from our target audience to watch our film as it was. However, when asking them about what they had just watched 2/3 of them were confused about the typing on the screen. One person correctly identified it as a newspaper, but they suggested that we used a different font and size for the title of the newspaper. On the other hand, the other two weren't sure whether he was writing a diary of some sort.

Our media teacher then asked us whether we thought that a diary or a newspaper would be more creepy and show the extent of his obsession. My first thought was that it would be unlikely that someone could keep a diary on a computer, but then I thought about blogs. However, it would be unlikely that our main character would keep a blog of his obsessional thoughts about Mia because then people would see it and be made aware of his obsession before the story line had a chance to develop, so we chose to stick with the newspaper and took the first audience's members views on board. Particularly as you are more likely to be flattered if someone writes a positive newspaper article about you, compared to a diary entry, which most people would find creepy and sinister.

Neurosis Draft (without music) Feedback

This is what we have so far, however, there are a couple of shots missing and there isn't any music added yet. We uploaded it onto facebook and youtube to see what people thought of it how it was and if the messages that we wanted to convey were conveyed effectively. By doing this in advance of the deadline it will give us a chance to see if we need to make any changes and to see if we have successfully made our film appeal to our target audience. Here is what we asked the audience to comment on:

These are a mixture of the comments that we received:

Overall, I would say that most people thought that he was sinister (or that someting wasn't right about him) and that Mia was being portrayed as vulnerable. A couple of people said that they didn't know that she was vulnerable until the end of the opening two minutes when the pictures were displayed. However, I don't see this as a bad thing because it means that within the opening two minutes it is shown that she is vulnerable and we have sucessfully conveyed what we wanted to.

Deleted First Scene

This was are initial first scene. However, after filming it we decided that we wanted to change the scene because we didn't think that it worked well with our film and it gave too much away. Moreover, as a group we felt that Leon falling on the floor made it too comedic and drew attention away from the story line. Also, when we compared this scene to our research on psychological thrillers we noticed that we had introduced too many characters in the opening scene as most of the films that we looked at stuck to introducing 1-2 characters. We uploaded the video onto http://www.youtube.com/ and http://www.facebook.com/ as we wanted to know if other people agreed with our opinions. These are the questions that we asked:

These are some of the comments that we received:

The comments that we recieved confirmed our opinions on the fall being too comedic and not fitting in with the genre. Therefore, we changed this scene to just Horatio following Mia as it was more simplistic because the audience were not being bombarded with characters and works better with our genre. Moreover, the first comment we recieved was also helpful as it showed that we had effectively conveyed that Horatio was an isolated member of society.