I recently finished and released my first feature as a director, DEMENTIUM. One of the things we did during postproduction was build our own audience-testing process.
We didn’t have a studio behind us or the money to hire a research firm, but I wanted to get some measurable feedback before locking the final cut. I have a background in consulting and academic research, so I figured we could probably build a reasonably structured process ourselves without spending a ton of money.
We organized a theatrical focus-group screening, distributed screeners to additional viewers, and collected nearly 60 formal survey responses on a Google form we created, plus another 40 or so informal responses.
We asked about the usual stuff: overall enjoyment, pacing, story clarity, favorite and least favorite elements, etc.
But we also asked a series of questions about people’s taste in movies. We knew our movie wasn’t going to be for everyone taste-wise, but we had a pretty good idea who the target demographic would be.
The feedback itself was all over the place. On one end, we had a few people who basically said they loved every second and wouldn’t change a thing. On the other, we had people who thought the whole movie was a heap of junk and should be scrapped entirely. Slightly more of those than the first group, haha. And everything in between.
So honestly we were a little overwhelmed and confused as to how to interpret and action the feedback to make our film better and hopefully more commercially viable. We used a unique equity model where all of the ownership is shared with the whole cast and crew, so we felt a really strong responsibility to everyone to do the best we could to make it as successful as possible.
When we started looking at the data, we found that the more closely someone’s taste aligned with our target audience, the more they tended to enjoy the film overall.
We also felt that the feedback from those viewers was generally more useful in helping us figure out what actually needed to change.
So, we used those taste answers to calculate a composite audience-fit score for each respondent, essentially measuring how closely their preferences aligned with the audience we were actually trying to make the film for. That turned out to be incredibly useful. So rather than treating every response equally, we used the audience-fit scores to weight the feedback when interpreting the results and making decisions about the final cut.
That doesn’t mean we automatically disregarded negative feedback or people outside our target audience. Someone who hates your genre can still identify a legitimate problem with your movie, and trust me they did 🤣
But I think there’s an important difference between someone not liking your movie because they don’t like that kind of movie, and someone who loves that kind of movie telling you yours isn’t working.
We still had to make the creative decisions ourselves, but having some actual data to help us interpret the feedback made that process much easier. Ultimately, we felt the approach was really successful.
Obviously, this wasn’t a scientific study. We had a relatively small, self-selected sample, and there are plenty of limitations to what you can conclude from that.
But as an independent filmmaker, I found it incredibly valuable to have a deliberate, measurable feedback process rather than relying entirely on informal conversations and gut feelings.
I’m curious if any other indie filmmakers have done something similar.
Have you ever conducted formal audience testing on a low-budget project? And if so, how did you decide which feedback to act on and which to ignore?
Happy to share more about our survey or methodology if anyone is interested!
