Evaluation Question 3

Script

What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

Over the period of our project we have tried to interact with our prospective audience as much as possible. To start, we constructed a profile for our target audience. We decided to aim towards males and females between the ages of 14 and 25 (often referred to as young adults) that are living in urbanised countries that consists of mixed social and ethnical groups. As our genre is indie rock, the target audience would probably have been already introduced to and may already have an interest in this area of music – otherwise it is unlikely they will engage in something new. This makes It easier to cater for this audience – as it narrows down the prospective viewers of our music video and digipak.

During the research portion of the blog, I investigated how existing music video texts draw in their target audience and meet the user’s needs, uses and gratifications. This is often through the usage of mise-en-scene elements to apply to conventions of the music video’s genre – as this is the easiest visual way to apply to an audience. For example, you would be able to tell that a genre is indie rock through the usage of costume like ripped jeans and flannel shirts – clothing that is also worn by that genres prospective audience. Doing this research allowed me to construct a basis of conventions that we needed to apply in order to please our targeted audience.

Each member of our group constructed an audience questionnaire that was utilised to find out what our audience actually wanted, rather than only using guesswork about what they wanted to see from a music video. My questionnaire focused on what music genres and videos our target audience liked, which they thought were memorable and explanations as to why they had chosen these examples. I then wanted to identify the target audience’s opinion on some stylistic decisions we wanted to make; whether they agreed with using a letterboxed aspect ratio, whether they preferred narrative, conceptual or performance-based music videos and whether the shot choices should be for aesthetic or for narrative progression.  In order to have a clear divide between genders I handed the questionnaire out to 10 boys and 10 girls, all of which were between the ages of 16 and 22.

After analysing the results of the questionnaire, we were able to draw some conclusions that would affect the creation of our own product. We obviously got a mix of answers for people’s favourite genre and artists but were able to find out some very impressive existing texts that could inform our own work; including, Logic’s 1800, Hozier’s Take Me To Church and Jamie Lawson’s Wasn’t Expecting That. The best one out of these when looking at the narrative we had planned was Take Me To Church; so receiving that in audience feedback was very refreshing and informative.

The next questions were the best learning experience for us out of this questionnaire. We found that people preferred a mix of narrative and performance, they thought letterboxing is professional and makes the product more cinematic (perfect for a narrative based product) and that they thought there should be a mix of narrative focused and aesthetic shots – allowing us to be experimental with what we shoot. The feedback we received here confirmed that our choices were well founded, and we were glad that we would be able to apply each of them to our work with the support of our prospective audience.

Branching off from the questionnaire we decided to conduct a filmed focus group with our prospective audience; asking them the questions shown in the questionnaire. We took a group of mixed genders, all within the age of 16-20. The answers we were given mirrored that of what we received from the original questionnaire; we learnt again our audience’s opinions on shot variety, letterboxing and narrative vs performance, along with their favourite genres and music videos. Despite getting similar answers it was still a good idea to conduct this focus group, just in case there was any differentiation in answers from a different group of people and age range.

The longest section of our project was the production aspects – creating both the video and the Digipak ancillary texts. During this stage, we needed to receive feedback at as many points as possible so that the final product that we created is exactly (or as close to) what they want to see; as this will improve the success of the product when it is released to the larger market. To receive this feedback, we used two different focus groups; one analysing our first draft and the other analysing drafts two and three.

The first focus group aimed to give us improvements for our very first draft of the video; so the product was in its least complete and perfected state. We asked them what their favourite and least favourite parts of the video were; so that we could learn what needed to be improved the most and what needed the smallest amount of tuning. Our audience enjoyed the bonfire and smoke grenade scenes; teaching us that the usage of shots that branch out from what you would normally see (unconventional) were going to make out product more memorable. They also enjoyed the zoom transition (again an unconventional editing technique) and the framing of the band sequence. We learnt that we needed to change the ending; as it didn’t fit the tone of the video and didn’t make sense to our audience. The reasoning behind this was that it was incomplete and the footage we had used had made the ending too ‘happy’ and ‘upbeat’. Having this problem that we knew about pointed out by a focus group really helped us in making the decision to conduct reshoots. Finally, they pointed out that there wasn’t enough lip-syncing for a music video; which convinced us to add more.

We then chose another focus group, this time including people outside of our primary target audience (as we are creating a music video that can be digested by any audience). We showed this focus group our second and third drafts – where we had applied a lot of the changes identified through our previous audience feedback. On the second draft we learnt that our audience enjoyed the colour in the video (as we had applied a colour grade to the product) but that we needed some more improvements like varied transitions and once again more lip-syncing. After taking these improvements into account we conducted another interview with the same focus group. We came to learn that the lip-syncing was greatly improved but as we had tweaked the colouration again it was now too dark – so this was our main cause of concern for the final draft. Also, we were given the feedback that there needs to be ever so slight editing of our timings so that we fit the beat with both cuts and lip-syncing – as it was slightly off.

By conducting focus groups throughout the creation of our video, I feel we were able to create a much better final product that people of our prospective audience will enjoy. We took each bit of critical analysis to heart and altered the product to fit the demand. Each bit of feedback informed the final draft – which is the best possible outcome for the video that we created.

Moving on from the video, we then began working on the ancillary texts – the Digipak and Tour/Album poster. This is where our audience outreach could have been improved, as we only conducted one focus group when designing the front cover of our digipak. For the front cover we had an original plan of having a shot of the band shrouded in flame. However, we came to the decision that we didn’t think it looked professional enough and as a result we conducted a small focus group on our audience’s opinion. The majority vote went towards using the double exposure technique as opposed to the original idea. We learnt that the audience thought this was simple but powerful; something that would stand out on a shelf surrounded by other products. We also found out that they preferred a certain type of double exposure. Both of these things went on to be incorporated in our final digipak design – along with also using the double exposure technique in our album poster. To improve, we could have conducted another couple of focus groups concerning the final digipak and which poster our audience preferred.