Evaluation: Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

During the process of editing we did some peer assessment on class members documentaries so far, and obtained useful feedback on how to improve.

See our ‘Peer Review’ post. Many pros included; good evidence of contacting our interviewee, an effective organised schedule, successful use of media (images). Some of our cons were; to use less archive footage, to make sure all the images corresponded to the voiceover at the right time and to make sure all the sound levels were consistent.

One way in which we improved the poor quality of the sound was to bring sections of the interviews/voiceover up or down so, the sound was consistent throughout our documentary. There were also parts in Martha’s interview were the narrator had spoken over the top of Martha’s answer, so we decided to edit the sound levels by taking down the volume of the narrator, thus having no overlap of Martha and the narrator.

Another way we improved our documentary was by using less archive footage by creating our own images to replace the footage found online, as we found we couldn’t use as much as we thought. However, archive footage is a common feature in many real documentaries, providing evidence for the exposition of a documentary, we could not use much of it in our documentary as we would have penalised.

The advantages of having peer-assed our documentary before we finished, was we could take the criticism from our class mates and apply changes to our documentary and keep them in mind for the development of our documentary. Another advantage would be that our class mates were completely honest in their feedback and more precise, as they know what to look for in improving our documentary, as they are also improving their own documentary and  are able to point out things that we may have missed. Moreover they can make suggestions on further development and technical suggestions (such as, transitions and sound levels) as they understand the production process.

A disadvantage of this form of feedback would be that someone that isn’t as familiar with the process of editing would be able to point out different aspects of our documentary, which aren’t necessarily technical problems. Moreover, our media class only consists of about 12 pupils which will not give a wide range of views and opinions.

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Akash Singh + Laura Dunning