Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

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144 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER AUDIENCE RESEARCH —FREE DISCUSSION By a member of Shell Film Unit at the Shell Film Unit in May, 1947, we showed the first two of a series of six films on 'How an Aeroplane Flies' to an audience of thirty schoolboys of matriculation standard. The idea was to find out how the techniques employed would be received, and how they would think the films could be improved. The thirty boys, who were on the science side of a London school, were accompanied by their senior and junior science masters. The other adults in the audience included the producer, the three co-directors of five of the series of six films, and an observer from the Institute of Human Relations. None of the boys had any extensive knowledge of aerodynamics, though some had flown and two had recently joined the ATC. It was decided that since the questionnaire method had already been tried on other audiences in respect of one of the films {Lift), free discussion should be tried out on this occasion. (An account of the 'questionnaire' experiment was published in DNL Vol. 6, 51st issue.) The afternoon was conducted as follows. First the fact that experts in the subject were consulted during the making of the films was explained to the audience, and they were invited to consider themselves as a group of experts who were there to suggest how the films could be improved. Lift was then projected. Discussion on Lift followed for about twenty minutes, after which there was a break for tea (the appropriate time having arrived) and then Drag was projected and afterwards discussed for about half an hour. The free discussion form of audience-reaction test provides no objective standards or statistical answers such as can be obtained from a questionnaire, and a summary of conclusions can only be a subjective one and to a certain extent personal to the observer. As far as could be judged, all the boys were keen to help with the experiment, and (after a little initial shyness) were not abashed by the presence of strange adults. The two films, Lift and Drag were made with this type of audience as their lowest intended agegroup, and are also destined for use in training air crews and ground staff. Lift employs simple analogies (e.g. boys marching between benches forming a narrow gap to explain Venturi effect), a good deal of demonstration apparatus (e.g. a wind machine directing a stream of air over a model wing to which pressure gauges are connected to show the variations in pressure on the upper and lower surfaces), and some shots of aeroplanes in flight, stalling and landing. The commentary in both films is simple and dire< I No music or effects are used. Lift employs no diagrams; but in Drag several diagrams arc used, the use of analog) is lightlj increased, and there are more actuality shots of aircraft. Drag was shown in the cutting copy (run double-headed), which was in a fairly complete state, opticals having already been cut in. A married print of Lift was shown. The two films are of approximately the same length — sixteen minutes each. The most encouraging thing (from the filmmaker's point of view) was that both films apparently promoted a desire for further knowledge of the subject. After seeing Lift a hot discussion raged on what happened when an aeroplane went vertically upwards; after Drag there was quite a bit of argument about the terms 'resistance' and 'drag' which the boys did not regard as synonymous. There was (especially during the second film) a very keen noting of points of detail — 'The oars would be deeper in the water' (of a shot showing the swirls made in water by oars); 'One of the weights' (on a balance) 'seemed to be a different size from the rest'. 'When you had the oil in a beaker and water in a beaker and air in a beaker, you put the rod into the air beaker and said it wasn't so sticky, and a drop of water came out' (fell off the glass rod which had just been in the water beaker). 'You didn't say the flaps had dropped' (of a stop-frame shot of an aeroplane landing). In fact, nothing escaped their eagle eyes, which amply confirms the fact that 'It'll get by' is not good enough. An important point concerned tempo and construction. The film Lift, because of the nature of its content, goes straight through from beginning to end, without definite breaks. Drag on the other hand is broken by section titles into a short introduction and three sections, and concludes with a summary. After the showing of Lift there was a general feeling that the film was 'a bit fast'. On analysis this proved to mean, not that too little time was spent on each point, but that the points came too quickly on top of one another. The demand was for more breathing space: 'It didn't give much time for each point to sink in." 'It was a bit fast, T didn't feel I could do w ith the four' (five) 'other films.' There was general agreement that the section titles in Drag overcame these difficulties, which serves to emphasize that instructional films must be punctuated. Simple section titles are apparently good punctuation ii II ks. but it was agreed that wordy titles are undesirable; for instance one boy suggested that there should be a title mentioning all the mainpoints at the end of each film. He was howled down by his companions, and then said thai it would not be a good idea. One boy had 'close-up trouble'. He complained that he saw a man walk up to an aeroplane, and then the man was "taken awaj and we onl) saw Ins hand', an interestingly naive waj of describing the cut from mid-shot to close-up, reminiscent of the cry "Where are their feet?' which is said to have gone up when D. W. Griffith invented the close-up. In general, however, this audience jppeared not to share this trouble, being normally conditioned to cinema. It is interesting, however. that this isolated instance of close-up trouble on lined on a close-up of a hand; there was ap parently no difficulty over close-ups of faces, which are far more common on feature films than are close-ups of other parts of the body. More serious was the complaint that (of Drag) 'the film darted about from place to place too much'. On analysis, this was found to concern a sequence of wind-machine and balance demonstration in which (after the general set-up had been established) close-ups of the scale pan, the pointer and the object whose drag was being measured were intercut fairly rapidly. The boys agreed that they wanted to "stand back and watch the whole experiment'. At the same time they criticized the 'waste of time watching all the weights go on the scale pan one by one", so it is apparent that the determination of correct tempo depends largely on the degree of obviousness of the point being made. This is bound to vary with different audiences. This came out very clearly in discussion of a graph illustrating the fact that the drag of a given object varies as the square of the velocity. In the film this grap slowly built up from experimental evidence obtained in the preceding sequence. Long be really looked like a graph, the boys were muttering impatiently, anticipating the final form of the diagram, and in subsequent discussion it came out that the boys were accustomed to graphical methods of dealing with these sort of data, and would have been prepared to leap straight from the experiment to the finished graph without intermediate steps. With another audience the intermediate steps might have been essential, and it is quite probable that to be ahead of the instruction once in a while is no bad thing. It was at this stage that it became e\ idem that this class of boys were conscious of themselv es as a group — they discussed the effect that certain sequences were likely to have on people younger or older than themselves, and asked what sort of people the films were made for. The audience were critical of certain diagrams and water-flow shots in which white dashes or dark particles moved right across screen. They complained that these were 'hard on the eyes' and that 'it was hard to concentrate on the particles — hard for the eves to follow — the whole screen seemed to run away from you.' Although there is little concrete justification in the notes of tins discussion, certain doubts were raised in the minds of the film-makers on the rea value of the visual analog) technique. On the whole the images that stuck in the minds of the members of tins audience were the direct examples rather than the analog es I sequence showing stream-lined and non-streamlined Objects m an air flow made visible by smoke, fo; instance, had far greater impact than the analog) Ol .i sliding pack of cards which illustrated the behaviour of air layers in the boundary region o an aircraft's skin. Vi mi. the brief appearance of a ver> person able voting woman struggling against the wind a: the beginning of Drag caused quite a stir, but it is