In this blog I will be looking at and discussing the response and feedback I got from my short film, this will include looking at YouTube analytics and comments; Instagram analytics and comments; my questionnaire feedback; and any personal messages I received regarding my work. I wanted to talk about each aspect in sections so that this blog is as clear as possible and I can see where I got the most engagement and feedback and where I may have lacked a little in views. I am going to be focusing mainly, and in more detail, on the YouTube analytics as this was my main area I wanted to get engagement from, but I will discuss all aspects of my audience reactions and responses.

YouTube Analytics: I thought I would discuss my YouTube analytics first as this was my main uploading platform for my work and is where I personally sent everyone to go look at my work. Even through my Instagram, I redirected everyone to this YouTube link as I thought having the majority of my feedback and analytics in one place would be much more helpful for this portion of the evaluation. 

First I want to look at views and where these views came from, I got, at the time of writing this blog, 347 views. I am very pleased with this amount of views considering I didn’t really do any type of advertising, apart from posting on my Instagram, so to get this many views without the help of advertising or marketing is more than good enough for the sake of this project and evaluating the response. Since posting this video to YouTube and writing one of my previous blogs about uploading, I have had more time to play around with the analytics part of YouTube and see what this shows and where I can see everything. YouTube has an extremely wide and detailed set of analytics to show who has been viewing my work, where they found my work, the watch time and much much more. Although this was all quite overwhelming to begin with, I have combed through these analytics and screen-shotted a few things I felt was interesting and relevant to how well my project did and what was a direct result from some of my actions.

One aspect of this I found very interesting and very pleasing to see was the traffic sources, more specifically the ‘suggested videos’ and ‘YouTube search’, these show how people got to my video either by what they searched and by what they were watching beforehand.

The YouTube search analytics show that the majority of the searches that resulted in my video coming up, apart from one “balloon sex”, were along the lines of “short horror film” and “horror short”. This is extremely pleasing to see as, as I mentioned in a previous blog, I had specifically put “A Horror Short Film” in the title so that when people searched for something along these lines my film would appear. So, I am sure you can imagine how happy I am that this actually worked and contributed towards the success and views of my short film.

The traffic source from the recommended videos was surprisingly random, though many of them were also horror films, short films, or student films. This, I am assuming, is due to the tags I placed on my video as I purposely tagged “student film” and “horror short film” to my video so that hopefully this, being recommended after similar videos, would happen.

Another traffic source analytics that shows where people found my work from is the ‘external’ traffic source, this again, shows where people found my work. But more specifically where they found my video outside of those that found it through YouTube directly. This shows that the majority of external traffic was from Facebook and Instagram, these were both intentional, in a way, as I had purposely promoted my short film on Instagram and had also shared the link to my Facebook where I encouraged others to like and share. This has all obviously worked in order to get views and reach a wider audience, which is what I was hoping to be the outcome of this.

Another graph I was showed in my YouTube analytics was this one below showing the “audience retention”, or in other words: how long the audience watched the video for. It shows that the average is around 1:56 minutes which isn’t even half way through, I am of course disappointed by this a little bit but am not completely shocked now that I have re-watched my finished product over and over. I, and some others, shown in my questionnaire responses, agree that my short film had a little of a slow start to the story and that the most enjoyable part of this short film is the nightmare sequence. However these analytics show that many people stopped watching before the nightmare sequence even showed.

If I were to do this again and, in the future, if I decide to make any other short films or feature length films I will focus much more on things such as script writing and story telling in film, as I feel this is where I fell short. I can definitely admit that my strong points lie in directing, editing and SFX and not necessarily script writing, which is very evident through this film.

Lastly in my YouTube analytics, I wanted to look at the responses to my “poll card” that I placed at the end of my video. Although this only got 3 responses, out of now 400+ views, it does say that all the people that responded replied with “yes”, and since this is in no way a main source of responses for this evaluation, I am still pleased with these few responses.

Instagram Analytics: In terms of my analytics on Instagram, I decided only to focus on two main things, my “content” and the website clicks on each post I posted for this project, and my “activity”, especially the “website clicks” and “profile visits” analytics. I am focusing on these because, for the sake of promoting my work, likes and saves etc, really isn’t as important. I am looking at these analytics as they show if these posts actually did what I intended for them to do, which was to send people from my Instagram to my YouTube video.

As the screenshots below show, this is exactly what these post did, I had changed the website link on my page to the YouTube link, as I talked about in a previous blog, and these screenshots show that within the week of posting these posts I had 64 website clicks, whereas I usually have none. This is also shown through the other screenshot of my content as none of my other work ever gets any website clicks whereas these promotional posts did exactly that.

 

Questionnaire: As well as all the analytics and statistic I received to show how many people watched and where my audience came from, I also wanted some direct feedback from my audience so I can get an idea of their opinions on my short film. I made sure to make this questionnaire little more detailed than some of my previous ones for other projects by having 11 questions with different variations of detail in the answers I was asking for. Some of these questions, for example, the first 4, were just to get an idea of what kinda of demographic I reached with my work, where as the others are more about the audiences opinion and thoughts of my short film and how it could have been improved to be more entertaining.

The first 4 questions were very generic questions just to give me some context of who was watching my short film so that I would consider this when looking at the responses to the other questions. My first two questions show that the majority of my audience in this case are females between the ages of 15 and 20, this will most likely be due to the fact that my main promotion, other than a few Facebook shares, was through my Instagram page, which is dedicated to makeup and so has a predominately female audience. The age aspect makes sense due to the subject and topic matter, since this is the age group that tends to be interested in the Horror genre in general, and so I was expecting for this question to get this kind of response.

The next two questions I asked were more specifically to do with the genre and if this audience is already an active horror fan or wether this is some of the only horror they watch. The majority of answers to “do you ever watch any horror” were yes, which means I am getting responses from people who are already aware of the genre and so have something to compare this short film to. However, the next question asked how often they watch horror and the answers overwhelmingly consisted of “sometimes” and “rarely” which means that, although this audience may be somewhat familiar with horror, they aren’t necessarily avid horror fans. Although this doesn’t really change much in terms of my other responses, it does mean that the audience may not have been too picky about the themes in the film as they don’t eat, sleep and breath horror.

 

These next two questions are also quite basic questions but are more important of gathering the overall audience reaction to my short film. In response to the first question, asking wether the audience enjoyed my film or not, everyone who filled out the questionnaire replied with “yes” which I am so so thrilled with.

The reposes to the second question in this screenshot is also overwhelmingly positive and with only one answer not being “yes.” Here I was asking my audience if they felt this short film fit well inside the horror genre, I asked this because I feel horror can be a very subjective genre and so felt it was important that my audience felt that there was no doubt this was a horror short film and not a thriller etc. The response that states “sort of but not a scary horror” is fine by me as I was going for a more uncomfortable and disturbing horror than a jump scare kind of horror.

This next question was much more important than the previous ones to getting an accurate idea of my audiences opinions on  my short film, I asked what their favourite part of my short film was, and pretty much every single response related to the nightmare sequence or something within this scene such as the SFX. This is the best response I could have gotten, in my opinion, as the whole film did really revolve around this scene and I put much more effort into this aspect of my film. Another response that I felt was note worthy said: “loved the entire “aesthetic” of the short film and I found it very fitting with the plot”, this response is very pleasing to see as I was really conscious of my films aesthetic and how it related to the plot, subject, and style of the film.

I then asked the opposing question, what their least aspect of the film is, and the responses, like last time, are mostly quite similar. Mostly the responses were either to do with the drugs, the blood, and a slow start, the first issue with drugs and blood is down to personal preferences and opinions and so there isn’t much about this I could change, as you can never please everyone. The other issues with a slow start I have already briefly discussed when looking at the watch time analytics on YouTube, and can say I do agree with this to an extent but I feel I did the best with the skills I had and will admit that script and story writing isn’t my strong point. However, even though this is a negative, I still got 100% on my earlier question about wether they enjoyed my film, this shows that the slow start wasn’t enough of a negative to have ruined the viewing experience.

My last question, which I will also put the screenshot of here, also shows that my, not so great, story writing and telling lead to a few people saying the story wasn’t completely clear.

This next question is a little more basic again but I was very pleased to see that everyone who filled out the questionnaire, despite any issues they had with my film, would still be interested in seeing more work from me in the future.

Finally, I asked the audiences opinion on any changes they would make to the film in order for it to be more enjoyable and why they would make these changes. The majority of responses said they wouldn’t change anything about my work, however a few mentioned the slow start and a few also mentioned the drugs use. Both of which I have already talked about in this blog.

Comments & Personal Messages: I received a few personal messages and comments as well as all the other analytics and responses to the questionnaire so I felt it would be worth showing a few here. There isn’t much else I could say about this that isn’t obvious through the screenshots alone.

Did I get the response I was hoping for? I did, and I am really happy that many of my personal decisions and choices have payed off and have gotten me the views I ended up with.

What would I change next time? As mentioned throughout this blog, I have definitely learned that script/plot/story writing is not my strong suit which ultimately lead to a slow start for my film rather than an intense buildup. However, this I will of course talk about in much more detail in my final reflection.