What have you learnt from your audience research?

Audience Research:

Audience research is important as it allows us to find out what exactly the audience are looking for and how they would like our video to look and sound, allowing us to be accurate when producing our three products.

 

For our audience research, we carried out an online questionnaire, to ask people whether they liked our chosen track. We chose this method as we decided it was a good qualitative method as it allowed us to gain some incite to exactly what people wanted. Also, people were more likely to complete the questionnaire if it was online instead of doing one on paper or having us actually asking them questions as this would have been more time-consuming and people generally do not want to spend too much time answering questionnaires.

 

We decided that the target audience for our products would be people between the age of 11 and 30 because this is the most fashionable genre of music for people within this age range. I believe that this is because of the atmosphere that the music creates and also, the general age of the band members. It is also popular for this age range because people within this age range are more likely to attend concerts, therefore showing their interest in the band in a more communicative way.

We used this online questionnaire as we decided that it was the best way to meet a varied audience because, we wanted to make sure we had people of all different ages, gender and tastes.

Our survey then went on to ask people about what they feel the track is about. Most people picked up on the theme of it being about a relationship, with some picking up that this was about changes in a relationship, and how the person feels at different times. These were themes that we decided to try and convey in our video, using a variety of different techniques like the book and the flash-photos that we used in the final production.

People also felt that a video that picked out themes of a relationship, and going on a journey, would be an appropriate way to present this song, which is why we decided that this was the best way to do it. The most important information that we learnt was this idea of basing our narrative around a relationship because this is a fairly realistic occurrence for being within the age range that we were looking at, therefore meaning that the audience could relate better to the narrative because of the similar circumstances that they face.

In addition, 4 out of the 5 people who completed the survey felt that it should use a mixture of narrative and amplification, with just one person disagreeing, and feeling that only performance should be used. Again, we decided that this was the majority of the sample and therefore we went with the use of both in our music video to try and entertain the idea of a journey and relationships. We did not want our video to look like the original band’s video which looked unprofessional due to the lack of variation and the repetitive feel that it had due to being solely based on performance.

We also asked people to come up with any suggestions or ideas that we could consider using in our video. 2 people suggested that the focus needed to be on the male, and came up with the idea of using flashbacks to happier moments in the relationship, which is something that we incorporated into our video to give the audience that necessary insight into the moral of the narrative and the reasoning behind the storyline.

The main strength of this research method is that it is not time-consuming and therefore people were more willing to complete it and add their own comments, which meant that we had more ideas to take from our research and more feedback to look at and use to better improve our final production.

The main issue with this research method is that it was a little impersonal, because it was done online, so therefore we couldn’t always gain clarification on the reasoning behind some of the answers that were given to us. This meant that we were unable to be completely sure about what the audience were actually wanting and sometimes had to take guesses at what they were getting at in some of their feedback.

Final Audience Feedback:

For our final audience feedback, I mainly used a number of online resources to get comments.

We also sent the first draft of our final production to Thomas Robertson who is university media production manager and kindly sent us his comments about the first draft of our music video:

"A nice range of shots and good use of location, in particular the beach sunset. Lots of thought has obviously gone into camera angles and story boarding and this shows in the final piece. An initial criticism would be a lack of narrative in relation to the song however this is relieved with the photo album at the end of the piece. A very strong video with good reference points coming from the stop start animation and band onstage. Impressive to get that much stagelight working but get the guitarist to wear a darker top next time, dayglow compared to the other two."

We then took Thomas’s comment on board and in the final production we had a lot more narrative, using techniques such as the photo-flashing, and also increasing the editing pace which enabled us to put in more shots and vary the camerawork more. Unfortunately, without going back and re-filming the all of the performance scenes, it would have been impossible to reduce the dayglow created by the guitarist’s shirt. This meant that there was nothing we could really do about this and therefore we did not address this issue in the final production.

Feedback from Facebook (left):

Facebook is a very good method os gaining audience feedback, purely because of the massive audience that the social media site attracts, meaning that more people are likely to see anything that we ask or that we post on the site, which allowed us to target a large number of people easily.

Overall, we feel that the feedback we received was reasonably positive. The feedback from social networking allowed us to get the views and opinions of people who are in our target audience, gaining the views of people who do, and who do not, know about media.

People also offered some constructive criticism, such as that from ******** Cooke, who suggested that the video is a bit repetitive, with going from the shots of the band to the shots of the narrative and back again. This is the point of the contrast between the narrative and performance but we did make changes to the video in order to reduce that repetitiveness as much as possible. We did this by increasing the editing pace and producing a more varied number of shots, which meant that it seemed less repetitive as it wasn’t consistently jumping back to the same sort of performance shots.

There were also some good comments that were given about our music video. For example, I am pleased that ******** Cooke noticed the book that the character was carrying, as we were unsure if this would be noticed by an un-briefed audience. Also, it was refreshing to note that Thomas Robertson felt the shot on the beach reflected a sunset - an effect we were hoping to achieve, even though the shot was filmed at 10:00am.