Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I have used audience feedback right from the start of the year, all the way through to help with different aspects of the course. The first part of audience feedback that I gained was from our friends and family through a questionnaire that we designed as a group. We asked questions such as "How do you usually watch music videos?", "What are your expectations of rock music videos?" and "What colours do you think represent the rock genre? and why?". We handed out paper versions of these questionnaires for people to fill out and also sent them around the social networking site Facebook to gain some feedback from different types of media:



From these questionnaire results we found that most people watch music videos on the Internet and some on the TV but they are rarely downloaded to watch. The majority of people's expectations of rock music videos we found are that they should be mainly performance where the band are shown with their instruments. Also the colours that they associate with the rock genre are mainly dark colours such as black and white and grey. This audience feedback helped us to come up with some initial ideas including a black and white element and some performance shots of a band that we will feature.

The next part of audience feedback that we received was from people in my media class and my teacher when our group presented a "treatment" to them about what we hoped to achieve with our music video and all of our initial ideas. We got some really positive feedback from everyone that gave us a lot of confidence in our initial ideas and we knew that we had created some ideas that would appeal to a lot of people. This is a world cloud that I created on wordle that included some of the feedback we received:



Some of the other feedback we also gained from this session shaped our video and helped us improve our ideas. For example in the treatment we presented to the class we told them that we wanted to create a performance scene with an audience and have one girl stand out in the clothes that she wears to show she is the obsessed fan. The feedback we received however, told us that if we tried to created to "gig" type of scene it could look really bad as we do not have access to big enough numbers of people to come and star in our "audience" so it would look empty and not very professional. We took this positive criticism from the feedback and decided to instead create a performance scene without an audience and create more of a "band practice" scene.

After we had filmed our footage for our video and started to put bits of it together we then gained some more audience feedback to see if we were on the right lines with our production. We showed our friends some of the stop motion clips we made such as the guitar with the kisses and the magazine cuttings building up on the floor. The feedback we got back from this was really positive and everyone seemed to really enjoy it as it was something that was a bit different but really effective when put to the beat of the music. We also showed them the first draft of our music video that was concentrating on the ending where the music builds up and Charlotte rips up all the magazines. Everyone said they loved the first draft especially the stop motions and couldn't wait to see what we did next which gave us confidence to carry on the way we were going.

Each draft that we uploaded to YouTube, we made sure we gained some audience feedback on it to see if there was anything we could improve on or change or add. On draft 3, we gained some feedback from people that said we should take out a clip from the very ending as it looked like we had two endings. After the build up of all the music and Charlotte ripping up the magazines we had a clip of a slow pan across Charlotte's arm resting on top of all of the magazines and then we also had a clip of Tom putting down his bass against an amp. Our feedback told us that by only having one of these clips will make the ending better and clearer to the audience. We then asked a group of people which shot we should take out and the majority of the group agreed we should take out the shot of Charlotte's arm so that the ending shot was of Tom putting down the bass.



Once we had completed almost all of the video, there was just one part that we needed to finish but as a group could not decide that would be effective. It was the very ending of the video just after the stop motion of the sound board. We knew that we needed to have a very powerful ending due to the tempo of the music but we didn't know what to put. We decided to show our video to people in our media class and also people outside of the lesson who had not seen the video before to give us some ideas on how they interpreted the narrative and what they thought would be a powerful ending. We got some really interesting feedback from people on their interpretations of the narrative and they were all quite different which made us realise we had created an enigma code (Barthes) and our narrative could be interpreted in different ways depending on how it was watched and who by. Some of the ideas that we got on how to end our video included:

- Pure performance of Tom on stage
- Charlotte on the stage that the band had been on to represent her presence wherever the band is
- Lyrics appearing on the screen

We decided to take these ideas but also look at other videos on YouTube to see if we could gain any inspiration. We finally decided on our ending of Charlotte having the lyrics painted on her body and smudging them away due to the audience feedback we gained because they helped us see a new perspective on the meaning of our video and helped us with ideas.

The final bit of audience feedback we gained was from a screening evening at our school where we showed our final video to everyone in our year, the year below and people in year 11 who want to take media studies as an A level. We gave them a sheet of paper with 2 questions on it that were:

1. What did you like about our music video?
2. What is your favourite part of our music video and why?



All of the feedback we gained from this session was positive which made us really proud to have finished and produced something enjoyable for an audience. These were some of the responses we got from the audience:








All of the audience feedback that I gained throughout the year helped our group to shape the production we made and helped us make some important decisions that improved our video and made it the best quality for our target audience.