Katie Goult A2 Media: 2015

I felt it was very important to engage with my audience and get audience feedback at various stages throughout the making of my product. Before I started making my project I did a survey on the online site ‘Survey Monkey’ and asked questions such as ‘What would you expect to see in an indie music video?’ and ‘do you prefer for music videos to have an obvious narrative or do you prefer abstract music videos?’ this initial audience feedback allowed me to understand what an audience expected from products from a specific genre. I also asked questions about mise en scene and editing to see what an audience would expect from my product. Here is an analysis of my Survey Monkey Results:

http://www.slideshare.net/bobbbbbdhdhd/answer-analysis-of

From the findings I made as a result of this survey I was able to begin the making of my product fully understanding what it was that I needed to include these in my photos. This can be seen by the fact that I have heavily featured the artist within my video and he is lip syncing, to fully allow the audience to know that he is the main artist. Feedback on what to include in my video also included comedy and a narrative that is relevant to my song, from this I decided to include 3 different girl characters which relates to the title of the song which is 'girls' and also some comical elements such as the moody eye rolls by the girls and the sort of 'behind the scenes' shots that are included in my video. When asked what themes people would like to see in the music video, the most common were partying, love stories and fantasies. As these were quite broad answers, love story got the most votes so this helped me to decide to follow a love story kind of route which can be seen by the holding hands shot and the way that the characters attitudes change in relation to the song lyrics. Initially I wasn't going to include an obvious narrative however, due to this feedback I decided that to appeal to my audience more, I should involve a story line.

I felt it was important to do both a general questionnaire which was sent to everyone in the college, but also to do a more specific questionnaire that I gave to people of my target audience. By doing this I was able to see what was different about what attracted people in general and what attracted people of my target audience to products.

After making my first draft I conducted another, more specific questionnaire with closed questions for people of my target market to gauge their opinions on my product. The table below shows an overview of the questions and answers:

As a result of these responses I felt that a lot of changes needed to be made in relation to my product. One of the main areas that the audience picked up on with my product was that it didn't look very professional. When I watched my product back I found that many of my clips were in fact blurred or badly framed, as a result of this I re filmed these parts and put the new clips into my product, this gave a much better finish to my product and made it look much more professional. Another problem I noticed when I looked at my audience feedback was that many felt that my editing was not in time with the beat of the music, this was something that I changed as a result of this feedback. I rearranged clips to make sure that all cuts or transitions were on the beat, in the end this made my product much more appealing and made it look much more professional. In hindsight, I feel that I should have also conducted some face to face interviews or had more open questions, this closed questionnaire did not allow me to fully understand the problems that people had with my product.

I also did a questionnaire about my digipak and magazine advert to make sure that I had good continuity between my products. I made this questionnaire an open questionnaire so that I could get real opinions on things and how I could change them. I sent this via email and asked people to return it in digital form to make sure that I got a good response rate. Here is an example of one response I got:

One of the main things I got from this audience feedback was that my products had very good continuity. What I did learn however was that the text on the back of my digipak was hard to read, as a result of this feedback I changed it and made it more bold and colorful so that it stood out better on the black background. Furthermore, a major issue highlighted by this questionnaire was the fact that the text on my magazine advert was not very appealing as some people said they didn't like it in white and some people said they didn't like the font. As a result I did more research into existing products with the same target audience as mine and made changes to make my product similar, this on the whole will make my product much more appealing to the audience. However, I had to ensure that my product was also still individual, so I used a new font but one that was similar to existing. Another common thing that came from this questionnaire was that people said that my still images in my digipak and my magazine advert appear much higher quality than the moving image in my video. I believe that this is due to the camera I was using to film my music video and in future I would use a much higher quality camera, this is possibly why after my first draft the audience highlighted that my product didn't look professional.

I felt it was necessary to conduct a focus group and gain opinions on my final product. I did this with a boy and a girl that fell into my target audience:

From this feedback I found again that my audience felt that I had good continuity between my products. However one criticism was that on my ancillary texts the mouth of the 'face' is disproportionate, however that was argued by the girl in my focus group to make it eye catching as she said it stood out. Really this was the aim of my advertisement. Also a criticism was that my video featured too many repetitive shots, although this is a convention of real media texts, if I did this task again I would feature more shots.