Q3 Evaluation What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The first viewing was to an audience that we didn’t originally aim for, this was to get the opinions on the people that may just be flicking through channels. It was also a sample of people that we got to volunteer on the day of the viewing. However, we couldn’t get the correct audience that we originally aimed for on the day because of them all working on a day to day basis. even though this wasn’t the aimed audience - all of them being 16-19 years of age - we still received positive feedback, with constructive criticism, outlining what went well, and what needed to be improved. The majority of people said the footage was clear and simple to understand, along with concluding that the warning slide was appropriate for the topic, as they thought some people would have found the footage disturbing. However, the two main criticisms were an issue with the voiceover’s volume and the footage spent too long focused on Jim at the start while he was shooting. There is a negative side to using this sample, which is the younger generation of today do not tend to watch documentaries. Overall, the editing of the documentary was regarded as well done, too. The response given to the given knowledge of the profession was mixed, some people stated that they are now more informed on the subject, where as others believed the information given in the footage was not enough. If we were able to film a full documentary lasting approximately one hour, we would have placed more facts in the program, to better the audience’s knowledge and understanding. There was a group of 10 people obtained for the first viewing, who then filled out the questionnaire after seeing the documentary.

This is just an example of one of the questionnaires we got back

Audience feedback second viewing.

After posting the documentary onto Facebook, the gamekeepers son got in contact with me and said “my dad was wondering whether you'd be able to put that video onto a disk for him?” he then told me that the whole family had watched it and was very happy with the results. We have also been asked to make several other disks of the documentary as it is quite popular among them that were involved. With this positive feedback we can assure ourselves it was a success over all. This was very positive news as we had got the target audience interested and they were happy with the results. We also got back some more questionnaire’s back from other people that are also our target audience. The results show that the video was clear to understand throughout, and the footage was appropriate for the video too, they also reported that there was no key issues with the video either. However, they both commented in response that they hadn’t learnt anything from the documentary because they were both from a keeping background, one of the comments were “I know all about Game keeping, my farther was a gamekeeper” this response could be a common one due to people growing up in this environment, therefore they would know all about it. I’m sure this happens a lot in other documentaries such as traffic cops, a gypsy life, and other shows where you are taken into someone else’s life. From this information we should also take into consideration that we need to add more complex commentary too as we don’t want the whole show to be for armatures that are just interested in the contents, as the results show that people that are involved in this sort of background also are interested in watching it. It could be a factor that there aren’t many documentaries that look into the life of a Gamekeeper, and there for take the opportunity when it comes up. The other comments given in were “wished it had been longer detailing the build up to the shoot because the shoot is the last element in the gamekeeper season.” this comment has supported our idea as we used this five minute documentary to supply ourselves with what we needed for only five minutes. We said that this episode would be one of many different ones as each episode would involve a different season. So that comment supports us in what we would have liked to have done, we would have also like to have made it longer which was also comments we got from our facebook feedback. We also asked in the questionnaires if they would have changed anything if they could and why, one of the responses were “ask the gamekeepers more interesting questions” yet again if we were able to make the documentary longer we could have added in more things like this for example. We also asked “if the video was on telly as a program, would you watch it?” many people in the first viewing said they don’t either watch documentaries or not the kind that we had covered. But in the second viewing it was a different case as some results say “yes, because its interesting for people who do these activates and for people who might start being a gamekeeper, they can see what is done.”

Over all for our second viewing at out target audience the results were a lot more positive. The results show that we have managed to get the attention of our target audience, and we have good feedback from them, if we were to carry on and make a real go of making a documentary that lasted possibly an hour and we followed with the series idea having 6-7 episodes at different stages of the year, then its possible that our target audience would be interested and watch it. We would also be able to add in more interesting things and “details” to it. I think that in the end we managed to achieve what we set out to do.