We have gathered audience
research throughout all stages of our production from research and planning and
then for the final media product at the end. We have gathered this feedback in
various ways using: questionnaires, Facebook, and through interviews. By using
various methods we have been able to receive feedback from a large variety of
people with a wide range of ages and musical preference, which has enabled us
to gain feedback from many different perspectives.
Pitch Feedback
In the first stage of planning our music
video we came up with three ideas for the music video and pitched them to class
members; we then asked them to make comments from our pitch on the idea they
favoured and any extra points they wished to make. This audience research very
early on was to ensure that the audience would like the ideas that we were
coming up with and to also find out which idea and concepts they liked the
most. This would hopefully enable us to attract a large audience and increase
the bands popularity, therefore it being a successful promotional product.
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From this research we can see that from our
classmates opinion, the first idea is flawlessly the favoured one as they all
agree it fits the conventions of the genre and has been thought about
thoroughly. This feedback has its problems in that it is from our classmates
who are all similar ages and therefore might like different things to older or
younger people in the target audience. However as this audience feedback was
gained very early on to determine which path we were going to take, we decided
that it was strong enough to make that decision, as there was still plenty of
time for further research to a wider audience. This would therefore confirm that
we were heading in the right direction and also give us the opportunity to
develop or manipulate our ideas accordingly to the results of the research.
Pre Production Questionnaire
Due to our first piece of audience research
being very brief, we went on to create two questionnaires, one general and one
that was genre specific to people who favoured the hardcore genre of our
chosen track. This allowed us to gain feedback from both a general audience and
our target audience; we did this because we thought for a new band it was
important to target the widest audience possible to help increase their
popularity. This questionnaire was to ensure we were planning to include the
correct elements in the video and to confirm our initial ideas for the video
would be liked. This method of research was good for pre production as it was a
fast and easy method to obtain information on what the audience demand was from
our promotional video. Gathering this research allowed us to then create charts
and graphs of the information, which we could then use to manipulate any ideas
for a more favourable outcome. The only negative of this research is that we
had to process it afterwards for it to be useful, which took a small amount of
time.
From this
research we learned that the audience wanted to see a mixture of performance
and narrative in our video; both of our random selection questionnaire and our
genre specific questionnaire strongly support this with no one
disagreeing. It was also evident to see that we needed to ensure we had
faced paced editing as people who usually watch videos of this genre all agreed
that it was something that they like to see in a hardcore music video. We
understood from both previous experience and from this research that this was a
vital part to a music video in this genre to keep the audience engaged and to
link with the tempo of the song.
Facebook
Once we had created a first
draft of our music video we uploaded it onto Facebook and asked people to leave
some comments for feedback. By each of us sharing the video on Facebook we had
shared it to over 1000 people and received some valid comments about the
current state of the production from various age groups. At this point we were
able to tweak any points in the video from any feedback that stood out from the
comments; however on the hole the feedback was positive and ensured us that our
video was very close to being a finished and successful promotional video.
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From this feedback it is
clear to see that our video is drawing attention already due to having: 41
likes, 10 comments, and 4 shares, meaning it is already serving its purpose as
a promotional video. From the comments made their were no negative points but
only points brought up about parts of the video they liked and that they
thought would be memorable, such as the opacity shot of the lead vocalist
singing the lyrics to himself. This is a particularly valuable and reliable
piece of audience research as it is targeted at a large age range due to the
amount of people on Facebook. Consequently this also fits right into our target
audience of people in the age range 16-35 as it is less common for the very
young and older generations to interact with this kind of new media.
Twitter
Although we did not upload
the video onto Twitter, we posted links to the video and asked that people
tweet us some feedback on it. This again was simply to gain even more feedback,
as we wanted to ensure that we had created the product to our full potential.
Furthermore the more audience research that we could gain in different methods
and from a large range of people, the more reliable it would be.
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Although this feedback
supported previous comments that had been made on Facebook, we discovered that
this was one of the most limited ways to gain audience feedback. This was
simply due to the limitations of how many characters can be written on Twitter,
which made the feedback very brief.
YouTube
Once we were happy that our
music video was gaining positive feedback and there was nothing drastic that
needed changing, we decided to officially release it through YouTube. As
YouTube is a website purely for videos and has millions of visits per day, we
still decided at this stage it would be valuable for us to encourage any
comments of the video. This would help us determine the parts of the video that
stood out and learn which parts we had created exceptionally well so that we
could further develop in any other music videos we may create.
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From this comment on YouTube it has told us that in this production we were right to incorporate the use of special effects such as smoke and laser lights as it adds something unique to the video and relates to the genre. It is also evident that the lighting plan was thought out well and the previous experience we had with stage lighting really helped us with gaining a well framed and effective shots. Our graphic match at the end of the song was also picked up on and helped create a dramatic ending to the video that would help it be memorable to the audience; a dramatic ending is a good feature that we would consider using in future productions to give the video a final unforeseen impact.
Post Video Production
Interview
Although we felt we had a large range of audience research we thought
that we would do a final video interview that was aimed at people who have good
knowledge about the media industry either through education or career. By
gaining opinions from these people we would be able to understand how well our
video would match up to one created by an experienced professional. On the
other hand we felt that when people are being interviewed they are more likely
to give constructive feedback and take the comments made more seriously so they
do not look foolish on camera.
We found that this research
was very valuable from a technical side as all of the people we asked did not
prefer the genre which really helped them to pickup the good and bad parts in
the composition and creativity of our production. We were pleased that the
opinions of these experienced people supported that the video was very good
with faced paced editing and an interesting narrative. They all also suggested
that it was very conventional to the genre and included some very creative
parts that would be evident in a professional music video.
Ancillary Post Production Questionnaire
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