Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

A massive part of our A2 coursework was audience feedback. There is no point in creating a product if the target audience does not understand and enjoy it, therefore when we were at the stage of creating a rough cut, we showed it to our media class, who fit our target audience.

Here is the feedback we recieved. Our first rough cut did have far too many gaps, which was the main criticism we recieved. Obviously we worked hard for the couple of days after to ensure that we filled these gaps!

The next step was to ask some people who had not already seen our music video what they thought of it. Some of these people were media students and some were not, therefore we gained a wide variety of opinions and interpretations. We videoed it to achieve an authenticity of people's opinions, as we thought it was easier for them to express their feelings in talking rather than writing.

Here is the feedback video :

(Thankyou to Natasha Davies, Faye Grundy, Bethany Hobbs, Sophie Jones, Sarah Newnham, Megan Painter and Lewis Baker-James for appearing in this video.)

Another step we took was to post our video onto facebook to get some feedback from people who fitted our target audience description, this was handy as we could quickly display it to a large audience and any of our acquaintences who wanted to could comment on the video, therefore it would not just be our close friends who we have asked to give feedback.

What did we learn from this?

Here is a table of what the audience thought about our video as we showed it to them, and what we did to build on their constructive criticism.

We also asked these people who were interviewed to fill in a booklet about the ancillary tasks, which asked them for their comments and opinions on our digipak and magazine advertisement. This is what they said (i've also typed out what they said underneath because its quite hard to read) :

• In my opinion I feel that the way there are logos and representations of other companies on the magazine give it a very realisitic feel. Alongside his I would also say that the use of colours make the adertisement stand out. The text is very easy to read and the advert gives a lot of information without using a mass amount of text, keeping it simple was a very good idea.
• The magazine advert goes well with the CD cover. I like the way both images are quite dark and shady. I like the way the reviews lie (ie. star ratings) are below the images
• The magazine advert is similar to the CD cover, which creates synergy within the campaign. THe images are well edited and the text is easy on the eye.
• The layout is very professinal and the colours, fonts and lighting match the digipak creating a strong house theme. The professional touches such as the itunes and hmv logo work very well.
• I like the combingation f the dark background, suble images + light, clear, easy to read writing.
• Beautiful images, the upside down rose is distinctive and symbolic
• Maybe pictures better aligned.

• The digipak almost tells a story through the pictures used, I would say this is very good as it clearly builds from the music video. Again the use of logos make it look realistic and credible. It is kept very simple but at the same time very eye catching for the buyers. It definatley looks like an album to buy and keep.
• I like the saturation - could poss edit further?
• The dark imagery gives a hint as to the lyrical themes of the video. The sense of foreboding is conveyed through the open gates and tree shapes.
• Dark contrast makes it seem very gloomy and mysterious. I like the barcode positioned at the bottom right.
• The gothic theme indicates what the genre of the music will be.
• The use of dark low key ighting is amazing, the saturation of the pictures and lighting emphasise the message and tone of your vdeo. The front image works really well as it is a scene from the video and entices viewers as it does not give too much away. Also love the continual symbolism created by the rose
• I like how dramatic the pictures are. The front picture has mysterious elements that draws in audiences.
• The lighting makes it very atmospheric. The open gate draws you into the picture making you wonder what will happen next.
• Atmospheric - sets a sombre tone. Pictues are excellent, perhaps bottom right could have zoomend in on graves a bit more to distinguish it from bottom left.

We took some of the improvements which they suggested on board and this enabled us to create our final pieces. For example one person said that they pictures could be better aligned with each other in the advertisement, whereas another person suggested we edit the saturation further on the inside panels of the digipak. While we did not neccessarily do everything that they suggested, we discussed their opinions within our group and we decided on the best route to take to create the most appealing and professional looking product possible.

Other feedback which cannot be forgotten was the survey right at the start of the coursework! This was a survey which we gave to 10 members of our target audience, which contained questions about what they liked in a music video. Here is the sheet of pie charts which containted the results :

This was vital to the creation of our music video, as it was the first feedback we recieved and, as this was during the time which we were shaping our ideas, it influenced what we eventually decided for our music video.

To conclude, we asked our audience for feedback at every possible stage of our video. While editing, we would always ask another media student who wasn't in our group what they thought of various things we had done. This is so we could gain an outside opinion of our music video. We also asked non - media students for opinions as they would see the video less analytically and more as if they were really a member of the target audience. The feedback was vital in decision making, and we always asked people who we knew would give an honest and unbiased opinion.