Group - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

JP-
- Music Videos are adverts used to promote a band, so it is vital to create a video that will appeal to the target audience.

- We made are video to be for both focused viewer and ambient viewer. There is a lot happening in the video which can be exciting and there is a narrative to follow, however there is a large element of narrative fuzz and can be interpreted in many different ways. For those who do not interpret the videos narrative, it is just a selection of interesting visuals which can be good for ambient viewing.

- The purpose of the audience research was to test our ideas to an audience so we could make any suggested changes before it was too late.

- We conducted our audience research at various stages of our project.

- Our first part of audience research was completed before the pitch to gauge what the audience would expect to see in the video once would had suggested ideas to them and shown them the track.






- We used a site called 'Survey Monkey' to develop a questionnaire and we distributed it through Facebook to get a response from our target audience.

- We asked for locations, where they thought it could be filmed. We got a lot of variation in this, which told us that we would not have to confine ourselves to particular locations, we used a number of suggestions including fields, urban town areas, quiet streets and countryside paths. However we did not use famous landmarks and train stations as we felt it did not fit with our video's change in narrative.

- For the costume of our lead character and lead singer, we agreed with the majority of the responses to have him in slim jeans and a top. As a change of outfit was incorporated in the narrative we also had him wearing a shirt and brown shoes, which were also suggestions.

- We asked how they interpreted the song and what they would expect to see, and the response was largely supporting a fast cutting rate to match the song with a montage styled effect included.

- We gained a lot from this stage in audience research as it mostly supported ideas we had for the video, giving us the sense we were going in the right direction with our production.

AO-

The second piece of our audience research was taken after we showed our rough cut to our focus group, after doing this we got the following feedback:

It fits very well to the music

The variety in the distance of shots is good

A good use of creativity in some of the techniques used

Syncing needs to be improved

It is only a short sequence and more footage is needed for the timeline

Although this was a very short sequence of the music video, I think that the feedback was positive and we will benefit from the advice. The rough cut was very helpful as it gave us an idea of what to do to get on the right track and the footage that we had at the time was to the standard we wanted to achieve.

Our third piece of audience was after we edited the final cut of the music video, and we showed it to our focus group. For this research we asked people to comment their thoughts about the video on our blog. For this we asked and produced the results for the following questions:

What is the most effective part of the music video?

The majority of people said that the most effective part of the video were the sped up shots; either at the beginning of the video, or where the video rewinds through the house.

Do you think that the video is appropriate to the track? Why?

People seemed to think that the video was appropriate to the track, as it was fast-paced and had a fast cutting-rate. Some people also commented that it linked to the lyrics about ‘seeing the world’.

What is your interpretation of the narrative/

The majority of responses were that the main character was enjoying life, and having a good time.

What shots did you like, in particular?

Most people said that they liked the sped up shots at the beginning or the one were the video rewinds.

How could we have improved the video?

The only way that people said that we could improve on our video was to include band performance shots, as we only had performance shots with the lead singer.

This is a screen shot of comments on a blog of the feedback for the final cut of the video.

After seeing the responses from people I believe that they are all very positive, and we have received a lot of praise from the focus group. We can take from this that people really enjoyed the sped up shots, and that maybe we should have included more. I do agree with the people that said we could have improved the video by including band performance shots, as this would make the video feel like it is a band’s song, not a solo artist’s. However, at the time of filming, we did not think (as a group) that we need to include shots of the band, and we also wanted to go against the mainstream view of always having band performance shots.

TM-

We asked a focus group to complete a piece of audience research for our print work as well; we did this through the blog, and questionnaires. The results from the feedback are as follows:

For the digipak:
• People said that the digipak was striking, as one colour in each of the sides stands out.
• They liked the font and cover, with the over-lay of the images on these parts of the digipak.
• A lot of people said they really liked the front cover, because it was eye-catching and very aesthetically pleasing.
• Another thing which the group seemed to like was the fact that the front cover had a clear link to the track we had chosen for the video.

For the adverts/posters:
• The effect of the globe, which is being held in one of the posters, people found it to be enigmatic and eye-catching.
• Most of people said that the effect that was put onto the figure in one of posters was very good, as it made the stand out, and make the poster look as if it was 3 dimensional.
• Some people did say that the two adverts were not very similar and so did not really construct the same image for the band.

Here is a screen shot of some the feedback we got for the advert/digipak.

However, some did go on to say that the adverts and digipak together, look very striking, and show there is a clear relationship between them all. The reason for this was the blue, which is present on all of the print work we produced. The colour blue was a main feature in the print work, because we wanted to link the different texts together. This idea came from The Kooks, as they always use the colour red in their print work, and advertising, but we wanted to change the look, and make it our own, so we did this by changing the colour to a more striking blue.