Evaluation Task 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to effectively analyse my music video, I had to get, verbal feedback from teachers, video feedback from peers and feedback from social networks. Without their feedback the music video wouldn't have made significant progress.

  

Audience feedback is such an integral part in all stages of the production process as without the audience feedback we would not be able to know if our product was really attracting our target audience.

To gather our audience feedback, we decided to create a questionnaire that would give us both qualitative and quantitative data, so that we could get the best feedback possible. We also believed that by using a standard questionnaire for every person, we would be able to gather only the information that we require.

Audience Feedback Questionnaires

From the audience feedback they told me that some of the footage was too bright, and they needed to be darker to fit the background placed, so I lowered the brightness using final cut pro. This was very helpful as it helped contribute to the overall appearance of the video, making it look more professional.

After we made the required changes, we presented the final version of our music video, to teachers and fellow peers. This time we received much more positive feedback. We used their criticism to help better our video and use a balance of contrast, to make the video more professional, we did not want to make the video darker, when we tried to make it darker it only worsen the video, so we resorted to using a program called Adobe AfterEffects it proved to be effective when balancing the contrast.

What was different the second time through, was that we had to analyse other contemporary hip-hop videos, which inspired the amount of cross cutting present in the video. The constant cutting is present in most of hip-hop videos you could call it a convention but something we did not incorporate in our first draft. The other thing that kept coming into conversations was how well we were able to lip-sync really well in our video, bear in mind that there is a significant amount of rapping which made the process for editing really difficult.

The most important comment in my opinion was that they recognized that this was a narrative, and they were able to follow through with the narrative structure without having me to point it out to them.  This made me especially proud of our music video, because this was the aspect, which we found to be difficult and tedious, so having positive feedback on that aspect on which we worked especially hard on was pleasing.

Audience feedback was integral when creating the digipak. We asked around fellow peers, our media teacher and friends on what they thought of our digipak, I made a note of their impression, and created the pie chart below. They were impressed with our digipak, they though it resembled an actual digipak, they used words like "professional" and our teacher was particularly proud of the product, as she was present during the early production stages of our digipak, she saw our growth in our digipak and how far it had evolved from previously. These comments made me particularly proud of our digipak and that it bear close resemblance to actual contemporary digipaks.  

Audience Feedback was crucial, when  creating the magazine advert, in order to gain audience feedback, I took a similar approach when obtaining audience feedback. I took to fellow peers to analyze the magazine advert and see the faults. As you can see below, we asked people whether they thought the magazine advert reflected the same theme as the rest of our media products. They thought it was not synchronized with the rest of the media products, I have to agree with their opinions. They said the colours did not match the rest and did not give off that imagery seen in the other products, as our magazine advert initially were a slight orange and black.This clearly differentiated between the rest of our products, people initially thought they were separate from the rest, so we decided to incorporate the same colour scheme, the balance between red and black, which we initially used in our digipak, as this is a still image, the choice of colour is significant, when creating imagery and consistency.

Magazine Advert - Improvements

As you can see above, there is significant change in the magazine advert in accordance to the audience feedback, when we presented it for a second time, we received positive feedback and it was because the magazine advert was similar to the other media products and reflected the same theme. The pie chart below reflects the data I was given after the second viewing.

The questionnaire I took in to receive audience feedback, was to get a much more detailed description on how to improve our products, although it was time consuming, it gave us a much more in depth explanation of our mistakes. It allows us to see different unique responses from different people.This is an effective for us as it would allow us to see exactly what we were successful at and needed improving in all three of our products and also give us ideas on how to better our products, it encourages people to expand on their answers and this may bring up topics that we had not initially thought about. This would help us as it will allow us to gather as many different points as possible to ensure that our feedback is thorough and precise.

I also used social networking sites such as Facebook, to gain audience feedback, this is a screen shot from my mobile phone showing their reaction towards the music video. I used Facebook, as a means to gain feedback because it allows me to share it with so many people, rather than giving them a sheet to fill out their reaction. This is an effective quick way to gain audience feedback, and most of my friends on Facebook falls under my target audience.

If I could do it again, I would consider using interviews to gain more feedback from my target audience as interviews would allow the person to go into more depth about their answer. However, as interviews are very time consuming, I would not be able to interview all participants, therefore I would have to choose the candidates which could be argued be biased and in return not being returned with critical and constructive feedback.

Overall, our final music video, digipak and magazine advert this time received more positive feedback than negative comments. However the “negative” comments were constructive and helped contribute the overall quality of the final music video, final digipak and final magazine advert without their feedback we would not have seen were we went wrong and allowed us to look more intricately at other examples for inspiration.