Anna Thalman 0:26

Hey guys, welcome to the podcast today. We wanted to take you behind the scenes a little bit and just talk about test screening. We've been in the test screening phase four. A little

Kent Thalman 0:38

while. Yeah. I hard to say when it started and when it stopped, I think that a perspective that I wanted to take on the film right now, we're on, post-production our feature film. If you're new to the podcast and we, we are moving, we're getting really close to picture lock. It keeps taking longer than we want it to, but. Just because of time, just because of time limitations, but we know that the edit has a huge, huge impact on the film. And we've seen, it's been nice actually to see how it's improved. I think even maybe sometimes a little beyond what I thought was possible and it still has room to grow, but the, I listened once to the. Post-production what really editorial workflow, that Adam McKay talks about who direct advice. And he talks about working with his editor on that movie. And it was just really interesting because he wanted to launch into test screenings and do a lot, like he pushed for lots and lots of test screenings. And, um, to the point where it was kind of a burden on his editor and he said, okay, But on this film, we, we haven't been done in like a huge, or like an enormously copious number of test screenings, but we've really wanted to push ourselves to set dates and say, we're testing the film that day, that time, that place, no matter what, we start inviting people so that we, so that we know, and that we're motivated. And honestly, each one of those test screenings, I think. Kind of forced us to push it a little farther because when you know, you're going to show it to people, it, it really does. You kind of go, okay, this is not good enough. Like I need to, this isn't really done. And so you, you push it a little harder and it helps you move a little faster, I think. But also. It's it's just incredibly illuminating for, for us as filmmakers, to test screen, especially on narrative feature.

Anna Thalman 2:22

Yeah. And we sent out an email earlier this week with the questions we use for feedback, which we love using those questions. Some of them we learned in film school and it's kind of the. Collection of questions to ask for feedback that we found, that we've compiled into this, and they'll shift

Kent Thalman 2:40

a little bit movie to movie and project to project, and we love, we'd love to hear if you want. Go to that email and find a that download. If you're

Anna Thalman 2:48

joining, after we send this email, just send us an email. If you want a copy and we can forward it to you. Cause this is another great free resource and you can feel free to steal it and apply those questions to your story, whether you're in screenwriting phase or post-production phase or any phase where you need to collect feedback on the story and characters, these questions have been very illuminating. So you can look for that, but today we just kind of want to talk about some of our best test screening practices or things that we've learned through this process of screening. And we've done three in-person test screenings now. And. Virtually we've done a lot. I don't even know how many it was sometimes sent out to individuals,

Kent Thalman 3:32

people. We want their specific feedback, like trusted friends and collaborators and professors and such we'll we'll solicit feedback from them via email and ask them to watch the film and then jump on a phone call with us so that we can they'll fill out the form. Usually, sometimes they won't, but the main, most valuable thing is just getting on the phone with them so that you can really send. You know, the nuance and the inflection in their voice and get a sense of like, okay, what are they? You know, what, what did they understand and what didn't they've truly understand. And like, is there anything confusing and whatnot? And so that has been. Really really valuable as well. Honestly, I don't, I don't, I like having bowls because like the one-on-one I showed it to you now let's have a discussion about it. It has been really valuable,

Anna Thalman 4:16

especially with other filmmakers. I

Kent Thalman 4:18

think that's been valuable, yeah, that's a nice thing. We, we email it mostly just to film collaborators for the most part that that has its own advantages because they, they think a little more like a filmmaker. They can think about character and give you the exact feedback. Like you kind of need. But there's nothing like the feedback you get from watching it with a live audience. I think that that's the one reason you want to be able to watch it with a group of at least five, maybe 10, 15, 20 people watching it with

Anna Thalman 4:45

anyone. Lets you see it with new eyes. So even if you can only just get one friend to sit down and watch it. And it lets you open your eyes again and see it for what it is I think.

Kent Thalman 4:58

And we did that. Our first test screening, there was literally one person there and I didn't like that as much. It was not, it wasn't useless. It was valuable. And it helped us kind of know where it was, but I found it much more valuable and there were more people because it wasn't like. You know, it's like watching your favorite movie. Like we always watch Malala land with our friends and they always finish. And we're always disappointed at how underwhelmed they are. And so like, I feel like it just feels like, well, what's your opinion, but when it's a group of people, you can kind of get a sense of like, what's the general effect this movie is having on a group, you know? And, and how has that varying from, from test to test? You know, like having a least five, I think helps it feel a little less, like what's this person think of the film and it's more like, how's the film work. Generally, you know, it kind of, it's a better,

Anna Thalman 5:47

definitely better. Yeah. And that is one of the things I was going to mention as like lessons learned from this experience so first of all, you need a venue. If you're going to do a public screening. And if it's some, if it's people, you know, and trust to invite into your home, you can do that or into a French. That can work. We kind of wanted to get people who didn't know us already for our first screening. And so we reached out to a local library that had a, a room that could work and asked if we could use the room to see. And do a test screening and because we were not a non-profit, they said we could do it in exchange for holding like a Q and a session there

Kent Thalman 6:27

later, like a community event. We would help them with that as like a volunteer exchange, which

Anna Thalman 6:32

we were happy to do. So we set that up and, and they said they would advertise it. And we said, we'll advertise it. And we just stuck it on a bunch of Facebook pages locally and invited general public, but we didn't invite. Friends and family specifically, we try to just put it out there for people we didn't know. And yeah, only one person showed up who was a kind of a connection. His wife had worked on the film as an editor, so, he had never seen it before, so it was still valuable. But if you want. And maybe it'll be different for you for us that didn't draw crowd to just post it on Facebook pages. And, you know, it was an experiment, so

Kent Thalman 7:15

that didn't work. So on the second round we, we said, okay, we will invite people that know us and we'll, you know, we'll see. And so we actually reached out personally to a bunch of people that we knew and we posted it on

Anna Thalman 7:27

other groups. Maybe to a hundred

Kent Thalman 7:31

people. And we posted all over, like all the Georgia film, Facebook pages, which we had done before, which we'd done well, not as thoroughly, I think that time, but it was interesting to me that this time, every single person in the room knew us, except one who was the brother of someone that knew us, that he though he was the only person we didn't know directly. No. And so that was. Kind of bad for other reasons, because I was like, okay, well this has become like a group of people from the church we go to are all like hanging out with us and watching our movie. So of course they're going to be super gracious and really nice, but the two biggest valuable points were watching with a group that size and sometimes even more so because you know, them helped me see the film anew again. And. I could feel it like, and, and I think we could both feel exactly where the pacing wasn't working. Exactly what things were clear and unclear. And then we got a big bunch of feedback forms submitted, which were all valuable

Anna Thalman 8:31

for them. What can be honest?

Kent Thalman 8:33

I mean, they can be, and then some of them laid it on a little thick and then some of them yeah.

Anna Thalman 8:37

When you're screening. Yeah. If people know you that, you know, they, they're probably going to be a little kinder, than someone who doesn't know you, but. But yeah, it was still valuable. I'd say we had probably about 25 people screening

Kent Thalman 8:52

and I would also say that they didn't want to stay for Q and a afterwards, which I find really valuable, but they did fill out the form

Anna Thalman 9:00

while we were also short on time. Have that room past a certain yeah.

Kent Thalman 9:05

Library. There were some other things that delayed us because of things outside of our control, but meaning we ran out of time in the room, but that was lamented. And for me, I lamented the fact that we did not get to ask the audience questions alive and, and get to hear them respond and hear them bounce stuff off each other to see. What's really going on here and kind of dig deeper, but the forms are still really valuable and watching it with them was really valuable. And the number one thing we learned from that second test screening was that our first half of the film was still surprising to us, despite the many, many minutes, like 20 minutes, we'd cut from the film. The first half was still too slow. And it wasn't because, and I, I learned why, which for me, this might be going to a lot of detail on the loved and lost, had a lot to do. What makes domesticity interesting in certain contexts and what doesn't, I won't go into details on that, but it was a breakthrough for me. Like why is this so hard to watch? And so not as interesting as I thought it would be. And what would make watching simple sort of domestic activity more interesting. And why is it working in films like Korea? So I learned, we cut. We cut a lot afterwards. We cut another solid 10 minutes off the film. So the runtime of the film is, is reduced and we tested it a third time.

Anna Thalman 10:25

Yeah. And I guess one other lesson I wanted to say from that second test. Was just to arrive very early at your location? My bad, we didn't, we arrived what, 15 minutes. Maybe it was 30 before the screening, but we had already screened at the library before. So we were like, okay, we kind of know what it's like, we've tried out the venue. And then we showed up in there had been some, had some kind of a miscommunication. And the room that we had reserved weeks ago was. Under construction, they were painting it and there was stuff everywhere and it was just destroyed unusable.

Kent Thalman 11:00

It was destroyed really unusable taken like a whole day to clean it up and set up chairs. And

Anna Thalman 11:05

we're like what? We have a bunch of people coming and we didn't even know how many, like I said, we invited a hundred and posted it publicly, so there could have been more. So we didn't really know what to expect and. We had to hurry and make another room work and help them find a projector. And we had luckily brought our own speakers, but it,

Kent Thalman 11:24

we brought back up speakers, but good big ones. And that was, that was, we were really lucky.

Anna Thalman 11:30

We were also lucky that someone who came had an, had their own laptop as a backup cause our laptop had some issues. So there were a million technical difficulties that came up at that screening.

Kent Thalman 11:41

And that screening was really indicative of our experience. Making a feature film, because I think feature films just bring out the Murphy's law in the universe hard, or I don't know what it is. We didn't have these issues test screening, our short film. We didn't have nearly as many issues, even just shooting our short of course our issues are mostly just ignorance based, which is why we make films, right. So we can learn and get experienced and get better. But man, Yeah, that despite how much went wrong, everyone, a good group of people showed up. It was a comfortable viewing size for the room that we had. The projector looked good. The speaker sounded good. Everyone filled out their forms. It was a success

Anna Thalman 12:19

was a success. And so. Embarrassing to have people coming and we weren't ready. And we were trying to get through them together, which wasn't really our fault, but we

Kent Thalman 12:28

was

Anna Thalman 12:28

patient and understanding that we ought to have shown up much earlier and made sure that everything was working cause technical difficulties is just a thing. We also may have had time for a short discussion after the film. Had we not spent that time when people were arriving, setting up, that was a lesson I learned.

Kent Thalman 12:48

So the third test screening was at Columbus state Columbus state university. That's where I was. So I didn't get to attend this one, unfortunately, we had some illness in the family, which kind of next to some babysitter plans, but Anna was able to go to. Two nights ago, and that was. Actually a group of strangers that we didn't know, and they didn't know us, all except for our editor and her

Anna Thalman 13:12

husband, her husband, as a faculty member. And he had been to, he was our one audience member at the first test screening and he is. Actually said, Hey, I think that our film club might be interested in holding a test screen for you. That could be educational for them. And then for you, it gets you, some people watching it.

Kent Thalman 13:30

I never considered using an educational institution as a form of test screening, but it's like a perfect place to test screening. I mean, maybe not totally perfect. Cause these are filmed people which has pros and cons, but they are young and they're not like film professionals per se. And there's, you know, so there's just a bunch of students that they watch movies and they all have different tastes and it's just good. It's another way to test it out and see how's this working. And it was interesting because this group of people from our church was almost all. Parents. In fact, many of them were parents that were, in their forties or fifties range was the average, I think age range, there was exceptions to that and sex. So there were some young, young teenagers, like 12, 13 year olds, but there weren't a lot of those that was mostly people in their forties and fifties. Whereas this test screen with students with. Between 18 and 30. And most of them were like early twenties, not married, no kids, the whole audience, not married, no kids. And that for a movie that was really a domestic was interesting. It was a totally different demographic. And, and so that's another nice thing about test screenings is like hitting different demographics and stuff and seeing like, how's this play and how's this work for

Anna Thalman 14:41

people. And these are people who didn't know us who didn't know. Family or our city that we filmed in or our resources. And I actually feel like them being students was kind of the best of both worlds because they, they have their first impressions, like any audience would, but they also are wetting their pallets into like, learning about film and they would say, oh, Hey, it's that thing where you plant and pay off or whatever. And they kind of, they're excited about seeing these things. They're learning. And thinking about breaking down a film. So there was a lot of enthusiasm. I really appreciated the energy. It wasn't planting and paying off was something else that they'd learned in, right? Oh, it was dramatic irony. They were all excited about, oh, dramatic irony.

Kent Thalman 15:26

Look how they did that. And I was

Anna Thalman 15:29

like, yeah, good job. You know, that's great. So it was cool. It's cool to see them like applying the stuff they're learning right now as they. Analyze the film, but

Kent Thalman 15:39

really you're looking to just see, like, was there anything that was confusing? I mean, like we removed one tiny line of dialogue and something that happens in act three. Suddenly, it didn't make sense to like half the people there. Right? Like they were like, why is he doing that? And it's like, oh no, one's ever asked us that question because we lost that one line. And I remember thinking, I don't think that one line is clarifying what he's doing and act three. I was

Anna Thalman 15:58

running I for that line, we were trying to cut. There's two scenes we had for that line and we cut one of them and we did another one. And then we cut that one and we didn't like either of the scenes. But it was that one line I was trying to hold

Kent Thalman 16:11

on to hold onto a whole scene just to, just to plant one tiny line of dialogue. And then all of a sudden that one line of dialogue actually affected something in act three in the audience said, why the heck is he doing this thing in his house? Like, it doesn't make any sense. And so I was shocked. I think that what I learned from that. Was the audiences are a lot more perceptive than I'm. I sometimes give them credit for, and sometimes we go, oh, it's good enough people won't notice that little detail. Well, some little details make or break an act three moments.

Anna Thalman 16:44

Like sometimes you just don't know until you test, you might think, oh, this is going to bother people and you show it and they don't care. Or you might have stuff that you think you can't live without. And then you cut it. Either they don't notice or they do. And it's just a great, the test.

Kent Thalman 16:57

Always test it. Why would you want to submit a final film? That's not been tested before and you have no idea. Like people might ask questions or say things and you might go, oh, you know, I hadn't thought of that. It's such a big project, you know, like there's a million things you could or couldn't miss. And so like,

Anna Thalman 17:14

I have to test everything obviously, but I would do your best effort. And then if you're trying to workshop a solution, You can

Kent Thalman 17:22

test it. Even an advertising, like the Harmon brothers, they're like these famous advertisers, they test their scripts, they test edits. And they, they test their edits like crazy. They'll test them and test them and test them until. I feel like this is working about us. I mean, pretty much it's in the 95th percentile or higher, you know, it's like, it's like about as high and good as we can get it. That's when they release and everyone goes, wow, they're geniuses. How do they do it? It's like, well, they're not like just totally brilliant. They don't just do every single thing. Born geniuses, they just test it and they test it a lot to see how it's working. It's like R and D you know, you're, you're researching and developing and you're doing market research and it's not all just like this crass business thing. It's like book editing, you know, you're trying to communicate to people. And when you're doing something with this many moving parts, I think it's a little bit naive to think. I can just sit in an editing room with. Do this all I'm so fluent in this language, I've never made a feature before, you know, maybe you've made four or five features. Maybe you've made a hundred features. If Adam McKay who's made a bunch of movies is still testing his movies, like crazy all through the editorial. I don't think that any of us are too good for it. So

Anna Thalman 18:36

as always test their films too, it's just like, yeah, it's just a safety.

Kent Thalman 18:42

Yeah. And on that note, I would recommend David Sandberg's pony smasher, YouTube channel. Once again, he has a whole video on test screening and the truth about test screening in Hollywood and how he talks about like most people's impressions of test screenings are like, you get the dumbest morons in off the street to come and watch a movie. And then someone says, I think the movie needed more turtles. And then all the studio executives say, oh my gosh, we even put more turtles in the movie. And he's like, that's not really what happens exactly. There's things that are sometimes frustrating about test screenings, but he said, overall, they're valuable when they actually help you.

Anna Thalman 19:15

I love test screenings. I really enjoyed the last test screen that we did, and I've really enjoyed just sending out the film to individuals who are friends or collaborators or people whose work I admire who I've never actually worked. But who I feel comfortable asking for feedback, and that has been so enjoyable. It's just a way to collaborate and network with people. I never thought of it that way. I wasn't like trying to network by reaching out to people. It was actually people whose opinion. I was like, I value your opinion. I'd love to see what you think of this, but then it, it just ended. That we collaborate. You know, we are collaborating on the film to the point where I almost want to put every single person at our test screenings in the credits because they did help make the film and make it work.

Kent Thalman 20:02

That's a really, that's a really benevolent perspective. I think it's true. Honestly, sometimes I want to put test screeners. I mean, in our short film, we put all of our test screeners in the credits. Actually we definitely

Anna Thalman 20:12

could have, especially their names, which we didn't, but we've tested for a lot more

Kent Thalman 20:17

people with the feature than we did for the short, like the short, I think the short. That could have been addressed if we'd done more than just one small test screen. Yeah, that's true. One of the shorts we did recently, ish a few years ago. But yeah, so

Anna Thalman 20:32

I, I wanted to mention something about how we lay out the test screening that we learned in film school. And I think has stuck with us, which is to have people fill out the paper with the questions anonymously and then pass that in before doing a discussion. And I think that's really important. I definitely observed that in all our test screenings, but especially this last one, because we did have both, which was that people both

Kent Thalman 20:59

leaning the live Q and a, the written

Anna Thalman 21:02

anonymous feedback and afterwards a discussion because in a discussion, first of all, not everyone's going to join the discussion. So you're going to miss feedback from some people, and people aren't going to share as freely. They're going to feel a little more like. Like, I don't want to share that I was confused about this part, or everyone seems to think this about this character. So maybe I don't want to share that. I think something totally different. And it's only when I go back and read the papers. For example, a group of people who were like, oh, I didn't really like that character in this moment, whatever. And I said, you know, anyone disagree? Do you guys feel differently? No one really did out loud in the discussion, but I went back and read the papers and some people were like, oh, I really love this character. It really related to her. And I think it just shows me that there are things people are willing to say anonymously on paper that they might not be willing to say in a group. I super agree. And so we always have people pass in their papers before we discuss. You know, you're waiting around for everyone to finish.

Kent Thalman 22:06

You don't want people revising their answers based on group solidarity, which sometimes people are self-conscious about their opinions. It's

Anna Thalman 22:11

strange. No, it's like, oh yeah. I thought that was confusing too, even though they hadn't actually thought of that originally. So it's just good to gather everything and then do a discussion, but that

Kent Thalman 22:22

doesn't make the written feedback superior. It's different and it gives you a better perspective in some ways. But I think that there's also things that the live Q and a does that the feedback and in your experience and on this last test screen, cause I wasn't there. What do you feel like the values were of the live. Sort of verbal conversation that you have with the audience is super

Anna Thalman 22:41

valuable and super enjoyable. I just loved talking with these kids. I was surprised how long they were willing these kids, these kids who are about our age, some of them definitely were younger, but, I wasn't sure how long we were going to have. And so I expected it to be like a 15 minute discussion, but they really got into it. And we ended up talking for about an hour, which it does not have to be that long. And I didn't expect it to

Kent Thalman 23:09

be more valuable for you. Right. Yeah, sure.

Anna Thalman 23:12

Right. And, and they seem to be enjoying it and enjoying the questions and. I think I'll send an email out with those questions as well. The discussion questions, because that was also, those are also really important to consider what questions you're asking your audience. Did you use the ones I texted you? I did. And I added a few of my own as well as I went.

Kent Thalman 23:33

We came up with these incredible questions while Anna was driving to the test screening and I was texting her.

Anna Thalman 23:39

We hadn't done enough test screening. Okay. I mean, I kind of knew some of the questions that you'd sent me, from prior test screenings, we'd participate. Some are

Kent Thalman 23:47

the same as the ones that are on the feedback form. Some are a little different. Some they start the same, but then you can kind of dig and kind of follow a little bit more of a rabbit hole with the question and go into more detail because people can talk a lot faster than they can write most of the time, especially in today's age of, of texts and keyboards. We've not gone so fast with our handwriting, but. We can, I mean, like the written stuff will take a long time to write down and it's not that much, but the talking people can talk and talk and talk and you'll get a ton of feedback and she recorded it, which I think is something I would definitely recommend is do an audio recording of your test screen, just so you have a record of it.

Anna Thalman 24:26

And, I also think it's important to stay out of the conversation as much as you can while you lead that

Kent Thalman 24:32

discussion. No, for justify your creative choices and if possible, don't let the director do that discussion as the lead. However, and it sounds like did a great job.

Anna Thalman 24:41

Well, I just told them I, at the very end, if you have questions for me, then you can ask them, but I'm just going to ask you questions first. And I'm not going to answer them. So if they asked me a question or if they asked a question said, I was confused, what was the point of this? Then I would put it back towards the group and say, what do you guys think? What was the point of this? And let them answer it. And I didn't tell them like, oh yeah, you're right. Or you're wrong. I just kind of let them have a discussion about this film as they would coming out of the theater without having a filmmaker there to facilitate their discussion,

Kent Thalman 25:17

the

Anna Thalman 25:18

filming. just let them answer the questions and explain to each other and say, well, I didn't like this, or I did like this and why. And, anyway, so I would try to stay out of that conversation as much as you can. Let them answer that

Kent Thalman 25:34

very nice language Ana, I would command you stay out of that last conversation because I just think it's, there's nothing worse than a self-conscious filmmaker who says, like this was confusing and then the filmmaker responds by saying, wow, Well, the idea was, and it's like, well, no one cares what the idea was. It's your job to be getting feedback. So you don't want to do anything to impede them from. And if you at all start to get defensive, they're all going to stop giving you all of that valuable feedback that you're there to get in the first place. So like you're kind of wasting everyone's time. If you start to get defensive, which is why I recommend producers to run those meetings because. They weren't the ones truly the director, I think gives the, gives the film a point of view. They're the protectors of the stories around Howard says. And so it can sometimes be harder for a director to lead a Q and a, especially in Hollywood, the director maybe becomes too high profile and executive producers and studio representatives, or even just creative producers, no one knows them or their names and their faces, but that's not a problem for any of us. Luckily that none of us as directors are really famous enough to matter. Like people aren't going to go, oh my gosh. What was it like working with so-and-so if you have a name, talent, your movie, but you know, that's nice that you don't have to worry about that when you are in a

Anna Thalman 26:50

celebrity. Well, and there's, you still want to be careful, especially with virtual. Like, if you're sending your, your, film out, you don't want to publish it publicly. Anywhere. What we have done was upload a draft to Google drive and we share the link. With people who we have to like give them permission to see it. And then we just deleted afterwards. So that. Have

Kent Thalman 27:13

access to it. Once that's an old draft, we upload a new draft and that goes out to new people. And so like, unless someone tries to download it, unless you, and you can restrict, download access,

Anna Thalman 27:25

protect on

Kent Thalman 27:25

Vimeo, try and steal the film. But like, it's not like it's not a Batman movie. It's not like, everyone's like, oh, just leaked. And I can like, let this out loose to the public. That's all waiting for. No one would really, you know, it's like a cheap domestic

Anna Thalman 27:37

drama. You have to be careful. Cause I had people I've had a lot of. This is a premiere. I want to go to the premier or like, can you send it to me so I can just watch it? And I'm like, no, this is not a premiere. This is just to get feedback.

Kent Thalman 27:50

No matter how many times you use the word test screening, there are a lot of people who don't understand what that means. And so just make it clear at the beginning of the. This is a test. What

Anna Thalman 27:59

that means is this is not a finished film. You have to let them know they're going to see VFX plates. They're going to see this is not finished color or audio. Mostly. We just want to see how the story is working. You know, the other thing I would say is sit in the back of the room if you can, I, or, or in the middle, but somewhere where you can watch the people around you and get a sense.

Kent Thalman 28:24

Yeah. I like sitting in the middle because, I could kind of hear a little bit more like people making comments. I knew that there were certain people in the audience on our second test screen, because I knew those people. Who are a little more vocal maybe. And, so I could hear little whispers, like, wait, like, I don't think that all of this is, or they'd even say like, this is what's going to happen. Like sometimes they were right. And sometimes they were wrong. And so it's interesting to see like where they're at, but Anna sat way in the back. Don't sit next to each other because there's no point in doing

Anna Thalman 28:54

it. I sat in the very back cause I just like to watch people. Oh, they put their hands over their mouth at this part, or they kind of like, you know, it's just, or they jump or you can kind of see how they're responding.

Kent Thalman 29:07

Not this one. No,

Anna Thalman 29:08

I'm just giving an example. Anyway, hopefully that's helpful and encourages you to do some test screenings of your own, whether that just means sending it to individuals and doing a phone call afterwards or. You could try to get some sort of a public screening at a local library like we did, or I loved the film club at Columbus state. And they were like, if you know anyone else who wants to test, screen their film, let us know, because this was so enjoyable. And we learned so much, so they were very generous and I think there probably are. Salem programs at schools near you. That would probably be open to that as well. Yeah, that's great. Can make it a learning experience,

Kent Thalman 29:50

you know, in test screening, your film, like Anna said is a great way to network and meet people. And even if it's just with film students, those film students will become film professionals and those, some professionals might be people you want to know in the future. And so you don't, don't ever like who, who on the little guys. They may get bigger than many of them. If you're with a full graduating class size of groups of like film students, one or two of those people are probably going to go pretty far in their careers, or they may collaborate with you. I knew a young man in our film school who was like, before he even got into the film school, he was doing, he was making waves and, and he's still doing really well, but the. So, anyway, my point is, is that it's a great way to network. It's a great way to learn, which is the main thing that you're trying to do is learn your film. You're getting to know your film and where it really is, how it's actually communicating, which is helping you become more fluent in this film language, because you're like, you know, saying words and testing out a combination of words, and then you see how this person understood it and how they're reacting and you're learning communication skills, but you're doing. You know, with movies instead of with, you know, the English language or whatever language. And so, yeah, it's, it's totally valuable. I highly recommend it. And if you have any experience with test screenings that you want to share with us emails@filmsthatinvisiblemansion.com or respond to the email that you may have found the podcast through. And we would love to hear, if you also have questions about test screenings, if you're approaching test screenings or, or whatever, also feel. Or if you have funny stories relating to experiences in jest screenings, shoot us an

Anna Thalman 31:21

email. Well, and we go more in depth on this and every other step of producing a feature film in our film and family academy. So if you really want, in-depth help on these, you know, these steps all the way through, then you can check that out as well on our website, invisible mansion.com and then just click film and family. So, yeah. Awesome. Thanks for joining us. Hope this was helpful. Catch you on the next episode. See ya. Bye.