Screening report - Faye Jackson // A nightmare before Christmas

My Screening report:

Overall, our interactive screening of ‘A nightmare before Christmas’ on the 19th of December, went better than we expected. We managed to pull it off even though we were all anxious on the day that it wouldn’t all go to plan. My particular role was surveys and room design which meant I had to come in earlier at 12pm to set up and get organised before anything else because our presentation at an event like this is crucial and we wanted to be set to go so that we could spend time on makeup and costume before everyone began arriving. With help from classmates we begin pre designing room E170 to prepare for the screening at approximately 3pm. We had to fill the room as best we could by each bringing a contribution. This was more difficult than it sounds because of the size of the room and the empty space we had to fill. We all ended up contributing around £5, we did this by sharing out responsibilities. We felt this was the most efficient way of doing things to ensure that everything was complete by 3pm and everyone had their own task to do to make it fair. We all came together and ended up with a huge amount of materials to decorate the room and to make it as scenic as possible in relation to our chosen cult film ‘A nightmare before Christmas’.

This film was highly requested by the audience which is why it was selected to be screened. It was our group of three that first came up with the idea of screening this particular film as we felt like it was the perfect timing due to it being the Christmas period with everyone feeling festive. We believe that is why it was so popular in the end which meant we were under large pressure to make it extra exciting. We all had the responsibility to ensure it turned out a success for our audience with it being very popularly selected.

Using my pre-drawn plan, I began to direct everyone on where to put certain decorations, food, activities, games, photo booth, chair arrangements etc. Having the pre made plan drawn out already made everything a whole lot easier and quicker, giving us more time to rehearse our introduction and interactivity before the real event. We managed to have everything ready and set to go to early and had a lot of spare time, this is something we should take into consideration if we were to hold an interactive screening event again. Learning to manage time more efficiently would have made it less stressful.

We had to ensure that our screening was going to tailor to our target audience which is why our initial market research was so crucial, I created a survey as part of my contribution for everyone that participated in our screening to answer as they leave. Because the survey had to be done at the end we didn’t want to make it to be seen as a chore or like we were holding anyone up so to avoid this, I made our survey more exciting than just a piece of paper, I went out in the spare time we had and bought mini candy canes to attach onto each individual survey which seemed to be a hit. Along with helping us gain constructive feedback on our event, we could also see how effective our market research was in the way people fed back about our screening. As I can see from the surveys we tailored our event appropriately to our specific audience and our screening appeared to be a great success.

The whole idea behind an interactive screening is to give the audience an active role, to incorporate cinematic qualities while creating a lifelike game that links with themes and conventions as seen in the film being screened. Our aim when creating our successful interactive screening was to hope people would gain something out of the experience more than they would in a normal cinema experience for example. This could be anything from a different outlook, a better experience, a more memorable experience, more involvement, a laugh and something to take away when they leave. By using decorative features to create a realistic environment that relates to the film setting in many ways created a mood and set the scene so that when the film started the audience immediately felt more involved than they would sitting in a pitch black cinema.

Although, there were some noticeable repetitive comments under the question ‘What did you gain from this experience?’ many answers were not as positive as we had hoped and planned when doing our market research. In my opinion if we were to repeat the interactive screening event, we should have incorporated more interactive activities instead of making certain things optional, this could have enforced people to get involved in something they wouldn’t normally throw themselves into, resulting in people gaining a more memorable experience so they would then, have more to say under that specific question and potentially gain something out of coming to our event. This is another reason why market research is particularly important beforehand to understand what the audience want to gain from an event like this and then attempt to give them what they want within an understandable budget of course. In conclusion to this, our market research was mostly spot on in terms of tailoring to our audience, as seen in our feedback.

We asked everybody on the feedback sheets whether they preferred our interactive screening over a normal film screening (e.g. at the cinema) to help us answer the question ‘is film spectatorship merely a passive entertainment activity?’ after reviewing the feedback I noticed the results tell us that 60% off people would rather come to an interactive screening because they find it more entertaining. Whereas only 40% of people would rather visit the cinema because they would rather watch a film in a quiet, simplistic environment as appose to an environment, purely created for an entertainment / activity purpose. This shows our screening was carried out successfully with its purpose being aimed towards making it an event of interactivity and entertainment. Because the majority of people had not been to an interactive cinema screening before ours this proves our screening to be even more successful as they have now been introduced to a new style of consuming films in a completely different way they are used to. It is great to hear that we may have impacted some people’s opinions on ‘interactive screenings’ as this was one of our many aims when creating our initial interactive screening idea as I said above. In this case, we have met one of our targets successfully.

I would say film spectatorship is merely a passive entertainment activity if you allow it to be for example like our screening of ‘A nightmare before Christmas’, I would say our screening event definitely comes under this category due to its attempt of interactive features although some people didn’t like having this spin on a well-known cult film and some would rather watch it in a normal cinema environment for personal reasons which is fair enough, everyone has a different preference on how they like to view their films although it was good for everyone to experience both to then dictate which provides for their personal preference the most, due to this interactive cinema experience being new to most people. This in a way gave us pressure to pull it off as best we could so that their reputation for an interactive screening is high or remains high for those that had attended one before.

This project has definitely impacted our group working skills, working together to put on an event with quite a small budget and a lot to do, was a challenge to say the least particularly in the time frame we had with ours being screened before the Christmas break due to our film choice. In conclusion, I really enjoyed the process overall and the intense pressure helped us cover everything in the end. The surveys have massively helped us see what went well and what we could improve for next time.

If we were to take anything from this experience to adapt and improve in terms of our organisation, we should have considered the importance of market research even more seriously to avoid any negative comments at all, although constructive comments are good and will help us with improvement. The particularly constructive criticism we received has helped us know for next time so that we know now to take even more consideration than we did already particularly on audience preference that we are tailoring the event for. For example, we could consider expanding our surveys beforehand in preparation so that we narrow down our audience’s wants and needs. Although we did this already, as seen in pre-production and research I think we should have adapted the questions more or even produced a sequence of multiple surveys to get more detailed information.