As every filmmaker will know, creating a film is a painstaking process. Bringing your vision to life means pouring hours of time, effort, and energy into a project, along with a massive amount of your passion. So, when it comes to the integral stage of getting feedback on your film that you have worked hard, sweated, and sometimes cried over, there is always an element of risk that you may get hurt if your audience doesn’t like what you have made.

Creating a successful test screening environment is fundamental to gathering constructive feedback that you can take in and utilize with objectivity, but it is a difficult and often expensive endeavor. When organizing a test screening yourself, first off, you have to find and select a decently sized group reflecting your target audience, and you need to make sure that you have all their details on record to contact them later down the line. Second, you must find (and rent) a space to screen your movie. This can be a movie theatre or a local church hall, but it has to be big enough to seat your group comfortably so that their full attention can be on your film and what they think of it. These two fundamental steps can take a long time to organize and possibly cost you a lot of cash. 

With Feedbackity, these costly and time-consuming tasks are taken out of the filmmaker’s hands, as we securely share your film with members of our feedbacking community who are carefully selected to match your chosen target market and demographic. We do this to save you the precious time and dollars associated with self-organizing a test screening, allowing you more time to work on your project itself!

Once you have your unique, constructive feedback in, which comes in just five days, reading it and extracting what you need to perfect your project is an entirely different process. To get the most out of the feedback, the first thing a filmmaker should do is leave their ego at the door and get objective. Your vision may differ from what your test audience believed would work better, and that may be difficult to accept if you’re not being objective enough and letting your emotions and the attachment to your film take control. You might love one particular scene a lot or be emotionally attached to an interaction with a side character that your audience feels slows down the pace of your film. Allowing your feelings to take priority is a dangerous game. Objectivity is so important when assessing feedback received because if you let your heart take over, you will have wasted the opportunity and the costs involved in gathering opinions. When you set out to create your film, you set out to make it as well as possible, and taking on feedback is an essential part of achieving that goal, much like how removing the weeds from your flowerbed allows the roses to grow.

Because of how essential they are, test screenings happen at every level of filmmaking, from student films to the biggest Hollywood epics. Without test screenings, even the biggest films in history may have been harshly received. Would ‘Titanic’ have succeeded without cutting the run time down from four hours? It’s much less likely. 

With our carefully selected test audiences and the right questions combined with an objective and open mind, honest feedback can be one of the best editing tools for anybody bringing their vision to life through the art of filmmaking.