Feedback
If you are working in a professional TV environment you would almost certainly expect to get feedback during the edit. Feedback usually comes from the people responsible for commissioning the material in the first place, or from the producers, series producers and executive producers. It’s quite common at this point for directors to be asked to make changes to the piece.
Feedback is an important part of the edit process and can be very helpful. As you work on a piece you become very close to it, you know the material inside-out, and you know the rest of the story. However, the audience isn’t going to know this. They are going to see the piece once and they will need to be able to understand it first time around. Having someone come and look at your piece helps you to understand how your viewer will react. Shots or interviews which make perfect sense to you may not be so comprehensible to someone who hasn’t been intimately involved with the production. Getting feedback can feel uncomfortable, especially if you have put a lot of work into something, but remember: you are making this piece for the audience, so you will need to get an idea of how they are going to react.
When to get feedback
There are normally two points during an edit when it’s useful to get feedback. The first is at an early rough-cut stage. The first assembly is usually too soon for most people but it won’t hurt to get some feedback then if you want to. However, you shouldn’t leave it too long before you get feedback. When you ask someone to view the material you should explain where you are up to in the edit; if they are experienced they will know not to worry about little things, but if they are not experienced you may need to warn them. The second point at which to get feedback is when you have laid your commentary, music and effects but before you have actually spent time on all the fine editing.
Giving feedback
You may be asked to give feedback on someone else’s work. If you do then you will need to make sure your feedback is constructive. There is not much point in an edit telling someone that you think the location was wrong or you didn’t like the presenter they used. This is not something that they can easily change. You will need to stick to offering feedback on things that can be changed.
- Narrative structure: Does the piece make sense to you, can you understand it? You should be able to follow the narrative quite easily without having lots of things explained to you; viewers won’t have that luxury.
- pacing: Does the piece feel too fast or too slow to you? Are you getting information overload or conversely are you getting bored?
- Sequences: Is there a steady buildup of pictures and sequences or are there too many single shots? If it’s a radio piece are you getting a sense of place?
- Cuts: Are there any cuts which feel odd or which jar?
- Pictures and sound: Do you have enough pictures and sound to add colour and drama? Is the piece too speech heavy?
- Clashes: Are there moments when the pictures and the commentary don’t fit, or where the music and pictures don’t fit?
- Music: How does the music feel with the piece? Does it seem to complement what’s happening on the screen?
Evaluation
At the end of your project you are likely to be asked to write some sort of evaluation. The aim of the evaluation is generally to reflect not just on the production process but the degree to which the project has fulfilled its original remit. There will be a number of ways to approach this; however, the information you have been collecting through the production process here will help you to evaluate the project effectively. It will be useful here to refer back to the folder where you have collected all the various documentation. If your production has been made over the course of a few months then it’s sometimes difficult to remember everything, but your notes should help you at this point.
Brief, target audience and genre
It’s likely that you were given a specific genre and a specific audience for your piece. A part of your evaluation will be to demonstrate how effectively you researched your audience and genre. Any of the notes you make on evaluation need to relate back to the original brief. If you are going to describe a production process or a creative decision, you will need to describe it in terms of how it helped you to fulfil the brief you were given.
Background research
The first part of the evaluation should be to describe the kind of research you did to familiarise yourself with the genre. You will have looked at films, TV or radio programmes similar to the one you are making. Chapter 3 on research suggested a number of questions you should ask yourself. The notes that you did at the time on this chapter can form the basis of your evaluation.
Make a note of all the pieces which you watched as part of your background research. What did you notice which was typical of the genre you are creating? For example:
- Use of shots: Think about the chapter on shot sizes, moves and framing; what do you notice about the director’s choices?
- Sound: What was the background sound like, and how did it affect your reaction to the piece?
- Lighting: Was the lighting naturalistic or was the director creating a mood with the lighting? How hard or soft were the shadows?
- Editing: What kinds of edit decisions were made? Was the cutting fast or slow? Was it ‘naturalistic’ or was the director trying to tell the audience something through the choice of cuts?
- Pacing: Is the overall impression fast or slow?
- What did you notice about the mise-en-scène? The use of location, costume, makeup?
Critical evaluation
- Story: Who was telling the story? In a factual piece, was it an objective approach or did the piece have a more authored feel? If it was a drama from whose perspective was the story told?
- What can you say about representation in the pieces, particularly in regard to gender, race and social class?
Production research
You will need to demonstrate how you applied your research to your own project.
- Creative thinking session: Start by referring back to the notes on your creative thinking session. Here, the notes you took, however scribbled, will be useful. What ideas did you all come up with, why were some rejected? How and why did you decide on your final project? How did you stay focused on the brief? You should make the connection between the idea you eventually agreed on and the research you did initially on your genre.
- Creative choices: You will then need to talk about the choices you made during the production. Again, you will need to relate the choices which you made back to your original research. There are three questions to ask yourself: what choices did I make? Why did I make them? How did they relate to my research into the conventions of the genre?
- Audience: Who did you decide was your audience? What do you know about this audience which might relate to how you made your piece? Did this have any effect on the choices you made?
- Reception: Where and how would you expect your media to be consumed? Is it likely to be at home or in a public theatre/cinema? Would your audience have expectations of this particular genre of work? If so, what might there expectations be? If you want, you can create the kind of user profile which we discussed in Chapter 7 on advertising.
- Narrative: What kind of narrative devices did you employ – character, location, plot? Even if it was a factual piece you can think about your story, your contributors and the locations you choose.
- Narrative voice: How did you tell the story? Did you have a presenter, or just a voiceover for a factual piece? If it was a dramatised piece, from whose point of view did you tell the story? Did you use any devices like interior monologues or voice-over?
- Structure: How did you structure your piece? Did you include elements of story structure? If so, how?
- Representation: You could reflect on representation. Did you consciously try to use any particular stereotypes? Think about any representations you may have had of age, gender, ethnicity or disability. Were these representations typical of the genre or is this something you brought to the project? If they are typical of the genre you could give some examples.
Technical choices
Think about the choices you made about sound. Think about the different types of sound you used.
- There will have been the background sounds, things that were going on around you over which you had no control.
- You will have made deliberate decisions to record some types of sound, actuality and atmos.
- Did you add any sound effects? If so, what type and why did you add them?
- You may have added some music to the piece, in which case how did you decide what to use?
Think about the types of shots you decided to use and the type of filming you decided to do.
- Did you use a particular stylistic device, for example, handheld shots, to give a sense of ‘veritas’?
- You may have chosen to use a lot of angled shots, high, low or oblique angles. If you did, why did you choose to do it that way?
- Did you choose a lot of moving shots? If so, why did you make that choice?
- Did you choose to use a lot of close-ups which might create a more intimate or sometimes claustrophobic feel or did you go for lots of wide shots which might distance the audience?
How did you approach the lighting?
- Did you use any lighting or did you use available light?
- If you used available light how did this affect did the kinds of shots you could take?
- If you chose to use lighting, was there any particular effect you were attempting? Did you want to create a naturalistic setting or did you try to create some kind of atmosphere with the lights?
Production
In this section you may want to reflect on the practical aspects of the production.
- Decisions: How did you come to decisions as a group? Did you have a group leader or were decisions made by consensus?
- Teamwork: How did the team dynamic work? Was there a good working relationship or were there lots of arguments?
- Tasks: How did you identify the tasks and how did you allocate them?
- Time: How did you plan your time on the production?
- Production plan: Did you make or use a production plan?
- Shooting/recording days: How did you go about setting up your recording days? Who did what on the day?
- Risk assessment: Did you identify any risks on the shoots or recordings? If so, what did you do about them?
Feedback
There are different kinds of feedback. There is the type of feedback you get while you are in the process of making the programme. There is also the type of feedback you get once the piece is finished.
- Feedback in production: The first part of the chapter discussed the importance of taking on board feedback. You could talk through the feedback you got in the edit. At what stage did you ask for feedback? How useful was the feedback? Was it specific, was it given at the right time, could you use the feedback to make the programme better? If so, what did you do?
- Feedback after the production: What kind of feedback did you try to get after the production was finished? Who did you show the piece to and were they the target audience? What kinds of reaction did you get? Did your audience understand the references you were making in the piece? Was the response the one you intended from the audience or did you get a different response? If so, how did it differ?
What went well?
You could mention the aspects of your production which you think went particularly well. You should also indicate why you think they went well and how they relate back to the initial brief. You should also try to indicate why you think something was successful. Was it because of the research you put into it, for example, was it because you had the opportunity to rehearse or practise something before doing it for real, or were you just lucky?
If you are talking about the practical aspects of the shoot, how did this enable you to deliver on your creative objectives? Perhaps you were able to create a very effective lighting set-up, but you should also indicate how this helped to deliver your creative ambitions.
What would I improve?
You could think about some of the aspects of the piece you were less happy with. You could talk in terms of your creative vision for the piece – were there aspects of the vision which you couldn’t achieve? If so, why not? Was it for practical reasons? Was your vision too ambitious? Did it just not work out the way you thought? To what extent were you happy that your creative vision was right in the first place? If there were problems with the practical side of things, what went wrong? Was it something you might have predicted?
What new skills did you develop?
Think about how you developed during the project. What new skills did you develop? If you had any kind of preliminary exercises set before you started your project you could talk about anything you learned from the first exercise which you applied to this production.
- Practical skills: Shooting, recording, editing, lighting.
- Team skills: Team building, leading a team, creative thinking skills.
- Creative skills: Creating a vision, communicating the vision, putting that vision into practice.
- Critical skills: Learning to deconstruct pieces of media and to understand the component parts. Ability to describe and distinguish between different genres.
Conclusion
Writing a good evaluation is all about explaining how the decisions you took related to the original brief you were given. What did your research tell you and then what did you do about it? Keeping good records as you go through the production process will mean that writing your evaluation at the end will be a fairly simple task. You should not be afraid to talk about the challenges you met along the way, but always talk about the approaches you took to overcoming them. Don’t be modest: if you think something worked well and you were pleased with it then say so!