Evaluation question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

How did research

impacted on our music video?

My target audience is both males and females aged 13-30. This was decided after I looked at the song

itself on YouTube and Soundcloud and saw that people who were commenting/enjoying the track displayed an interest in the house genre and other electronic music, had ages that fell within this age range.

Teen audiences like house music, and this was a suitable genre because it is just as universal as genres like pop as anyone, whether they are young or an adult, can relate and enjoy the music. I found that adults would suitably fit into the target market as they would have grown up with house music, as well as experienced its creation, growth and evolution whilst young people (teenagers) were born into it.

From a personal perspective of the genre, I love the genre and listen to house music genre often as a result of my interested in the music beginning when I was 15 years old. I became more interested when I was 16/17 mainly because of the evolution of modern day youth culture, with music playing a huge part in this, with House music being significant especially in activities like parties to dance to and enjoy the atmosphere more.

Upon my research of the genre it was clear to see that opinions of the house music genre was that it is an enjoyable style of music because of happy/positive feeling it gives you, making you want to dance. It’s often associated with summer, a happy time that everyone looks forward to e.g. because of hot weather, no school, more room for friends, having fun. These are associated with young people (target audience) but at the same time, resonating with older

The typical member of our target audience would probably listen to mainstream house or electronic dance music of artists including: Duke Dumont, Route 94, Calvin Harris, David Guetta, Oliver Heldens and Martin Garrix

Target Audience

We also found the posted single on YouTube and looked at the people who were commenting on the song and it was clear to to see that people who enjoyed Ashaft’s music, also enjoyed other house music and other electronic dance music (EDM)

Social Networks – Opinions

As part of audience research I used social networks to help us determine the opinions of the

genre of our target audience as well as what they’d like to see. I thought it would be a good idea to use social media to help influence our decisions on genre and looked at different peoples opinions of the House music genre, and I was proven right by the positive tweets I found surrounding the house genre. Twitter was the most useful tool the tweets in the previous slide (and the image above) demonstrated the positive image around house music. For example one tweet stated that house music: “…House music can temporarily make me forget any bad feelings I have” and another stating “…We are all free #HouseMusic”. Both tweets demonstrated this feeling of freedom and liberation from listening to house music, suggesting a happiness that it brought them but also a sense of community within the fans of the house music genre, no matter what age you are.

The age range of people tweeting also helped determine our target audience because the people tweeting had ages including 13, 15, 19 and even 30, therefore we determined that our target audience age would be ages 15-30. The tweets from older people (e.g. a man in his 30s) were very influential because they demonstrated this resonance of house music through the ages/generations, even though he was now in his 30s, he could still recall the feeling house music had given him back in the 90s, recalling being young, full of life and most importantly: Partying! Therefore, I also aimed to achieve this in my own music video

Tweets

After filming had began a rough cut was created to show the general idea of how the music video would look, and so that I could obtain audience feedback

To get audience feedback I showed this rough cut to our audience and gave them a questionnaire to explore their opinions of the video, including anything they liked/disliked and things that we could improve for the video.

From the general feedback on the rough cut it was clear to see that the music video had a lot of potential but still had quite a long way to go to become complete and convey a professional appearance.

The responses ranged in being both positive and negative for example the scene involving the artist in the bus with red lights, whilst the video cut to the beat was by far the favorite scene from anyone who watched the rough cut. Therefore I decided that this should definitely remain in the video when it came to the final cut.

Obviously a key negative comment of the video was how shaky some of the shots were and to overcome this stabilizing-handheld camera equipment was purchased to see if it would improve the shots, which it did massively. Unfortunately, due to time constraints we could not re-film all scenes with this equipment meaning that therefore not all of the filming could be improved to have steadier shots.

Questionnaire – Rough cut

Audience feedback of completed video

I was glad with the final product and felt that it had potential to be a successful video, but it did have it’s faults. To see what people within our target audience thought about the music video I conducted a focus group, showed them the completed video and afterwards provided questionnaires to see their opinions. Overall, those who had seen the previous rough cut were able to see the major improvements of the video, commenting that it looked more convincing and complete. The continuity of costume throughout the video was successful as the costume never changes, this was also a successful feature in connecting synergistically to the ancillary texts as it made it much clearer to identify the main artist in all products; using the artist as the main feature of the video was another successful feature in achieving this. However a drawback in the success of the video was still how the steadiness of the camera could have improved to give it a more professional. Given the opportunity I would re-film far more of the scenes to achieve a steadier, more professional look of the video or alternatively, if I had the option of using a camera such as a Go-Pro, I would use one for a lot of the key filming to give it more of a first-person view that is achieved in Duke Dumont’s ‘I Got U’ video.

For this method of audience of feedback I showed our completed music video to a small

group outside of class. They did not know that they were part audience feedback (focus group) which turned out to be an effective method as they gave honest and real opinions with no pressure from myself to give a particular comment on the video. I listened to their comments on the video which included things such as “Shaking of the camera” was “unnerving” so they wanted it to look smoother so the video in general would look better. One member of the group was also critical in saying that they didn’t think it would work as a real music video, comparing my music video to other music videos they’d seen, constructed at A2 level from videos on YouTube. For example one in particular used 3 actors, with the lead singer lip-syncing to “Into the jungle” whilst the other 2 played real instruments (guitar and drums) in the background. They felt that this video was more effective and realistic in comparison to mine because: Their lead singer performed with dramatic effect, creating realism to his lip-syncing, the rest of the band played dramatically and with emphasis, creating the illusion that they were actually playing instruments and the camera angles were much smoother, sharper and cut back and forth from close ups of the lead singer/instruments, to mid shots of the band whilst using establishing shots with time lapses.

This was very eye-opening because it suggested that my product had far more potential to look professional and like a realistic music video, but just did not have the time to improve to such a standard

Alternative method of feedback

Digipak Feedback

Audience feedback for the completed digipak was taken after the magazine advert which was a successful technique as the audience members who viewed the digipak could instantly see the links between the products. It suggested that the product was successful in achieving synergy especially with the magazine advert in addition to the music video. The feedback we received suggested that the product was successful in promoting the artist, album & single, but also in conveying a professional/realistic appearance, increasing the potential for the digipak to appear in the real world as a real product. The use of my digipak connects well to the magazine advert and they collectively work as promotional package for the music video. The major key in the success of the product is the simplicity of the images which was recognized by some who viewed and commented on the digipak, the simplicity correlated with the simplicity of the music video and was suggestive of the artist being a very simple, perhaps down-to-earth person. The use of elements between them e.g. use of main artist and text create synergistic links successfully to promote the music video, the artist as and the single

Magazine advert

Audience feedback was useful in the completion of my magazine advert and digipak covers. On initial viewings of the magazine advert we discovered that the front cover of the digipak that is printed at the bottom left of the advert didn’t fit well enough synergistically with the magazine advert image. This was mainly because of the bright colours of the carrousel in the background (e.g. pink, yellow and green) and the extremely pale complexion of the main artist in comparison to the rosier complexion in the magazine advert. This criticism was taken on and as a group we decided to remove the album image from the magazine advert. It was then decided to change the central images of the digipak to be closer related to the magazine advert by now using images taken at the same location (Richmond) for example using 4 images of the main artist on the front and inside covers and personal objects to the artist like his backpack and his penny board (which does not feature in the video).

I therefore believe that the second magazine advert is more successful as well as the improved digipak because they became linked more after receiving audience feedback, demonstrating that audience feedback was very important in terms of improving my ancillary texts to promote the music video.