Evaluation Question 3

What have we learnt from our audience feedback?

INITIAL IDEAS STAGEThroughout our initial ideas we where heavily reliant on conversation with our audience in order to brief an idea. We firstly when drafting

possible ideas presented a few key select members of our target audience with brief overviews of our presentation. Discussing possible genres with them meant that we could make an informed choice and would know what they would be interested in within this particular genre of music. It helped us to establish a better understanding of the conventions expected in music, leading to the creation of our video being much easier.

Presenting this format online through our blogs meant we could establish an online presence in which to reach a broad audience. Our initial ideas process has 10 views and several comments from those outside our platform of reach. This meant we could understand more accurate and possibly less bias opinion from those who did not know us. Meaning it was possibly more honest and reliable.

QUESTIONAIRE

Going through an audience questionnaire gave us the confidence and reassurance that our production was manipulated towards our own target audience. Asking them their favorite music videos for example helped us to establish a much better connection with the audience and allowed us to explore a range of music genre videos in order to find a common theme on which to base ours on. This common theme meant we could create our video narrative to conform to the expected conventions. For example there is a lot of focus on gender stereotyping and reasoning. This therefore was important to consider within our production.

FIRST VIDEO DRAFTOur first video draft established a continued connection towards gender and the perception of that in society. We therefore took our video to our target audience in order to hear their opinions and understanding of it and understand how this interacted with other videos of similar genres. In order to achieve this we held clinic sessions whereby our target audience would feedback key features of video they like and those they didn’t like. We found this particularly helpful when preparing to expand and film different and new parts of the video. It helped us to build different aspects. However this process took a long time and our audience feedback suggested this was making the narrative less clear and much more confusing then first intended. Despite some pop culture music videos often exbiting confusing and twisted narratives, for example Justin Biebers ‘What Do You Mean’ music video relates to gang culture and drugs in America, despite the song having no direct link to the narrative. We therefore continued to use our audience feedback to alter and distinguish a clear narrative that would help us achieve the product our audience wanted.

CHANGE OF NARRATIVE

The feedback we gained from our first draft helped us to move on towards a much clearer and more obvious narrative. Despite our questionnaire suggesting that teenagers are fed up with a stereotypical ‘love’ and ‘romance’ narrative, we decided to go with this. However we felt as we where aiming for an indie hybrid production we felt reversing typical and traditional gender roles to produce a much more modern twist on the classic narrative of ‘boy meets girl’. By doing this our target audience told us they not only now understood and relate much more deeply to our narrative, but also found it refreshing and more entertaining to see the roles reversed. This therefore suggested to us that our narrative change was needed. One of our clinic sessions that included 5 boys and 5 girls also suggested to us that despite the portrayal of women in the video as needy, the young girls where not distressed by this and instead choose to relate or laugh. We think this comes from the underlining attraction and admiration for pop culture stars. Should a girl be lusting after Justin Bieber in a video, she is not seen as needy, but instead enviable to every other girl watching it. After learning this we felt much more comfortable in our choice to change narrative.

FINIAL VIDEOOur finial video audience feedback was important to us when continuing on with the ancillary. Firstly we questioned the audience on the recognizable and memorable features of the video. We felt like this was important so we knew what concepts where important to highlight or work on within the ancillary. Linking features together such as the brick wall background, or the long winding paths (As suggest by our target audience) meant the video and the Digi Pack clearly coordinated. This created a much better image for our artist and lead to the creation of his brand. Roland Bathe would say this ‘myth’ is what makes an artist so famous, taking obvious concepts and manipulating them into something memorable is a key feature of creating a ‘image’ or ‘brand’. Our target audience identified the aspects of our ‘image’ they liked and this helped the ancillary task to be produced quicker with much less planning.

ANCILLARY TASKSOur first ancillary task in the form of the Digi Pack was inspired by the previous audience feedback from our main video. As previously suggest we decided to capitalize on particular features of our video and use those to create our ancillary tasks. This meant that we could compare our products to others out there who had done similar things. Asking our target audiences thoughts on similar products, then picking out the features such as ‘block capital text’ and creating those within our own piece. Our audience compliment our house style and we felt this was important. Keeping our designs similar meant our brand was clear and there was limited confusion around the genre and conventions of the narrative. As we found out from our first task that it is easy to mislead or distort a narrative (because our audience suggested they found it confusing) so this feedback was reassuring.