What have you learnt from your audience feedback

 

One of the first things I did during this project to create a music video was to establish my target audience. Establishing my target audience was important in order to create a successful product. Therefore after deciding on our song and genre we collected a random group of people and asked if they would volunteer to take part in a focus group in which we would ask them questions on our chosen song. We asked both males and females and overall established that our genre and song is more suited to young females rather than males. We gained this information from comments from the females about the song saying it made them feel “Happy, relaxed and inspired”. Whereas the comments we gained from the males consisted of the song being “Boring” and “Confusing”. Due to us only playing a small amount of the song to the volunteers within the focus group we only gained a small amount of information regarding possibilities for our music video however once we had established our target audience we decided to film an individual interview on a young female who has an interest in the indie genre and in particular our chosen artist Lauren Aquilina. We conducted this interview on the 25th November 2015, we purposely chose someone who was familiar to our artist’s music and image in order for us to gain suggestions that would help us with our music video yet also protect and represent the artist’s image. From this interview we learnt that our target audience would want our music video to have a narrative involved as it “Links to Lauren’s other EP’s and represents the artist correctly”.  We also learnt that the setting should be outdoors and not in a studio and that low key lighting would be effective as our feedback from our individual interview stated that the music video “shouldn’t be bright”. From our focus groups and our individual interview we created a few initial ideas based on the suggestions we were given and our own ideas and created a rough draft of our digipak and magazine advert.

 

On the 28th December 2015 Grace and I created a rough draft of both our magazine advert and our digipak. We decided to draw these drafts as they just showed our initial ideas. After creating our rough draft we collected audience feedback through an online questionnaire. The information we gained from this feedback backs up our original idea for our target audience as the majority of people that took an interest in our ideas and completed the questionnaires were females aged 16 – 20. Showing that this is the target audience we should be aiming our music video at. Some information we also learnt from our online questionnaires is that they felt that our products suited the indie-pop genre and that the use of close ups on the artists were appropriate. We also gained qualitative data regarding improvements we could make such as; “to change the text”, “Brighter colours” and “To make the sad side more prominent”. From this feedback I learnt that the text was probably one of our weaknesses on our rough draft therefore we should try and alter this when creating our first draft of both the magazine advert and digipak using the computer and editing programmes. I also learnt that our audience liked the concept of our music video and the synergy between the magazine advert and the digipak therefore my group and I felt confident with our initial plot idea for our video as it attracted our target audience. From this feedback I began creating our first draft by using editing programmes such as coral draw, coral paint and compose lite.

 

After creating our first draft of both our magazine advert and our digipak we printed out questionnaires with questions based on the image of the products and how they made the audience feel. From this feedback I learnt that our target audience liked the effect of super imposition on our images with comments suggesting that it “Showed a contrast of emotions” and was “Very dramatic”. After analysing further I also learnt that 5/10 people we asked liked the typography used as it was said to “Portray the emotion as plain” and that it “stands out” against the image.  However the remaining 5 people didn’t like the typography stated that it was “Too boxy” and that it “Overrules the imposition”. Therefore from this feedback I learnt that the typography on my magazine advert was a weakness that needed to be improved in order for our products to apply to the audience. When analysing the feedback from our digipak the same results occurred. 10/10 people that received and completed the questionnaire stated that they thought the digipak synergised well with the magazine advert. We did received some suggestions that stated how we could improve our digipak. All of our improvements resolved around the typography with comments that the text was too heavily outlined and that it should be the same text as the text font on the back cover of our digipak. Some other suggestions stated that the typography should be “subtle with smaller outline and less of a bold font.” From this audience feedback on both the magazine advert and the digipak we realised that our typography was one of our most apparent weaknesses and therefore we decided to create a focus group purely based on the typography we could use in our ancillary tasks to make them more appealable to our audience and overall represent our genre correctly.

 

Therefore we gathered a group of people and asked them questions based on the typography. We gave each person a hand out which had a selection of different font styles on it along with the image of our magazine advert. From the focus group we learnt that the colour, position and size of the typography should stay the same however the group had mixed views on which texts to use, both text 4 and text 6 were picked by our members of the focus group however in the end we decided to use the 4th text as a comment stated that it was “subtle but effective” which is what we wanted to achieve with the text from past comments that our last text was too bold and took away the effect of superimposition. From this focus group we learnt how to improve our weaknesses from our 2nd draft and began creating our final magazine advert and digipak due to the information we learnt.

 

After completing our digipak and magazine advert we began to edit our music video. After completing our rough cut, we collected a range of feedback interviews from our target audience. We received mostly positive comments about our music video with the main strengths being about the camerawork and editing. However some suggestions were that the last shot should be shorter between the shot were the artist tips her head down and her head comes up again as it left some of our audience confused as to what was happening. The only other improvement we got was to add in more fade transitions as our audience felt they helped the music video flow. Therefore we took these suggestions into mind and began making changes to our video.

Once we had created our 2nd rough cut, we continued to show people we knew and gathered more feedback. One comment we received was that our video had a large range of emotional shots of the artist and not enough varied shots, regarding the symbolic shots (For example, the flowers and the ring). From this comment we decided to add in a shot of a picture being ripped up. The picture showed a couple holding hands. We decided this would be effective to our music video as it represents a break up yet is not too cliché therefore represents our genre effectively.

Once we had added this improvement to our 2nd rough cut, we showed it to a fellow media student. We asked her to write down the strengths and weaknesses of our video. From her comments I learnt that our strengths within the video were a variety of things, such as: the lip syncing, the camera shots, the editing techniques and the use of direct address. However the only weakness she could pick up on was that we had an extreme long shot at the beginning of the video. She decided this was a weakness as extreme long shots are not typical within the indie pop genre. Therefore from this comment we changed the beginning shot to a mid-shot in order for our music video to follow the conventions or an indie pop music video.

 

Overall from my variety of audience feedback I have learnt that initially our strengths from our media products was definitely our use of editing and superimposition. I would consider this a strength as our audience suggested that it looked effective and fit our genre correctly. However one of the main things I learnt from our audience feedback is that when creating a media product I should take the typography into consideration more as the effect it has on the audience and the overall success of the product greatly depends on the typography and whether it fits the genre.