Navigating creative uncertainty: Using notes from audiences to guide film production

A key feature of note giving concerns ‘who gets to speak for the audience’, as both creative workers and executives often ‘invoke models of audience behavior and competence’ for ‘authorial justification’ (Caldwell 2008: 221-223). Caldwell argues that this type of ‘audience theorizing’, i.e. industry projections about what audiences want, is ‘ingrained in the institutional ideology’ of media production and is used to ‘leverage control […] through note giving, thus constantly altering authorship’ (ibid. 223).<br/><br/>In this paper, I examine how the process of speaking for the audience becomes complicated when direct notes from audiences are integrated into production, affording audiences the chance to speak for themselves. Based on an empirical case study of a new audience initiative in the Danish film production culture, consisting of interviews with 20 exclusive industry informants, I examine the motivation, use and effects of embedding audience notes in the production framework. I contribute new empirical insights into note giving processes and expand the concept theoretically to also include complex interactions between executives, screen workers and audiences (Freudendal forthcoming), not only between executives and screen workers.<br/><br/>The study highlights how audience notes can stimulate creative processes but also how such notes can come into tension with artistic visions. The findings moderate statements that warn against audience feedback as it may ‘control creativity’ (Hesmondhalgh 2018: 330) and ‘impose the sales model on cultural products’ (Bourdieu 1998). Rather, audience notes can both enable and constrain processes and do not automatically lead to commercialization. Furthermore, the findings underscore how uncertainty still reigns supreme even when feedback from audiences is used in decision-making, modifying statements that see increased data-driven production as the end of ‘the days of the excuse “nobody knows” that has been used in television and film to explain unexpected hits and failures’ (Lotz 2022: 88).<br/><br/>References<br/>Caldwell, J. T. (2008) Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.<br/>Freudendal, J. (forthcoming) ‘How audiences influence media production: A theoretical framework of industry-audience dynamics’, journal to be confirmed.<br/>Hesmondhalgh, D. (2018) The Cultural Industries. 4th ed., London: SAGE.<br/>Bourdieu, P. (1998) On Television and Journalism, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. London: Pluto.<br/>Lotz, A. D. (2022) Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-Funded Video on Demand. Cambridge: Polity.