Soffia

Q3.WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT FROM YOUR

AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

To start our audience research, we conducted a questionnaire about the pressures on young people and what our target audience (11-19 year olds) liked to see from a documentary. We asked questions about what kind of presenter they preferred and the elements they liked in a documentary. We did this as we could then gain an insight into the kind of documentary that we should make so that it would appeal to our audience. The strength of a documentary depends on whether the audience liked the documentary or not and to find out what aspects they do like, we made this questionnaire. Another set of questions that we asked were about mental health issues, this was a key topic we wanted to address in the documentary so the documentary would have an educational benefit. We wanted to talk about things that we thought teenagers like ourselves would have dealt with so, we asked “do you think there is too much pressure from teachers and families to achieve high grades?”. We gained answers for all of our questions that influenced the making of our documentary in some way. For example, we used a voiceover narration for most of our documentary excluding the introduction, and we used statistics regarding mental health.

PRE-PRODUCTION

Some of the key answers that we gained, included that our target audience preferred a voice-over narrator, hence we decided to do this to appeal to our audience. We used a voice over for most of our documentary, with a short on screen presenting clip at the beginning. Majority of the audience preferred a female narrator and this inclined our decision to choose a female narrator for both the documentary and the radio trailer. The most-liked element of a documentary was the use of statistics and facts, subsequently this is something that we used frequently. One question we asked that influenced which experts we interviewed in our documentary, was ‘What do you find the most pressuring about college life?’ with the top answer being that they felt pressurised about making decisions for the future. So as we got this result, we interviewed the careers adviser in college on what she thought. Only two of the people who answered our questionnaire responded with a no to the question ‘Do you know of any young person to suffer with a mental health disorder due to the pressures of society?. We knew that mental health was a topic we wanted to talk about in the documentary and so audience feedback and research was a fundamental part in ensuring we got the correct information as so many people suffer or know someone who suffers with this issue.

Screenshot from documentary

The last key answer we got that influenced our decision making process was that students faced too much pressure from teachers and parents in achieving good grades. From this, we could talk about the fact that older generations may not understand the issues that young people face.

The next piece of audience feedback we got was from our peers in our media class who were in the age bracket of our target audience (11-19 year olds). Another group marked our blogs on what we had done so far regarding how good our topic research was, also research into existing products, audience research, planning of interviews and IT skills on the blog. We gained an excellent answer for one of our areas however we could improve on others including for example, the use of IT on our blog. So we decided to use YouTube for audience feedback at the end of the coursework and used presentation websites such as Prezi and Emaze.

The next questionnaire we conducted was to find out what radio station, TV channel and TV listings magazine that our audience would want or expect to see our products on. I did this questionnaire on a website called SurveyMonkey which allowed me to share the questionnaire I had made via a link. The link then took the audience to my questionnaire which they could answer from their phones or computer. From our results, the website generated graphs. We could recognise the most popular channels from our target audience and use this to our advantage. We listened to our audience as they were telling us what they wanted in a documentary, therefore I think that this is a key strength throughout our research and planning. To listen to what the audience wants and produce a documentary with our own creative influences is what I would deem as successful. We asked our audience ‘What channel would you expect to see a documentary about teenagers on?’ and the most popular answer was Channel 4. Another key question of this questionnaire was ‘Which TV Listings Magazine would you be most likely to read?’ with the majority vote going to What’s on TV.

From these results and the research into the background and audiences of each channel or station, we could tailor our products, for example adding ‘after the break’ to the ending of our documentary as Channel 4 includes advertisement breaks and including the Channel 4 logo in our magazine double page. Both questionnaires were part of pre-production audience feedback, as we had not yet made the documentary or any other products. These both were primary research as they came straight from our target audience and this was a valuable part in ensuring that we could adapt our products to our audience. I was pleased with how this primary research was carried out as we got a range of different ethnicities to gain a varied representation.

The last key question that influenced our decisions was ‘Which radio station do you listen to the most?’ and the most popular answer being Capital FM. The audience thought the same as I did, as I am a teenager also, we anticipated our results to be similar to what our group liked.

In terms of post-production, we decided that we wanted to use a range of IT techniques including videoing and voice recording along with more traditional forms of audience feedback in the form of questionnaires.

Before we started our radio trailer questionnaire, we played it to some people in our class who said that they could not hear the audio and that it is quiet in some places. We changed the sound levels on the parts that were too quiet and then we could put the updated version on the blog ready for audience feedback. For the construction of the radio trailer questionnaire, we decided to send out a trial/pilot questionnaire in order to get responses from our audience and to see whether the questionnaire made sense for a non-specialist audience. I asked 3 people to complete the questionnaire and included a question asking how this questionnaire could be improved. From this I altered the final questionnaire, for example by adding more open questions and also ensuring that the multiple choice answers do not overlap or confuse.

I then sent out questionnaires to my target audience regarding our radio trailer, I played the audio and then asked them to fill out questions honestly. I found that everybody we asked liked the length of the trailer, and I personally also liked the length of the trailer as all the information could be put in along with interview clips which was effective in getting different opinions across. I asked whether our audience enjoyed the use of music, with 60% of people saying the music was excellent and 40% saying good. I felt that if time allowed, we could have used perhaps more than one music clip or intensified the music in specific parts. However, most people said it was excellent so it appealed to our target audience. The audience told us that half of the people we asked said they strongly agreed with the following statement: I would watch the documentary after listening to the radio trailer. The other half said they agreed with the statement, so this means that the audience thinks our radio trailer was good but could be improved to get an overall ‘strongly agree’ result. However, as in Stuart Hall’s reception theory, everybody sees media products differently due to their own experiences and their views, subsequently, it would be unreasonable to expect an overall ideal response. I conducted verbal interviews too, and recorded my findings.

To get feedback on our documentary, a focus group was organised, we got three people and asked them questions, and the focus group meant that the interviewees could elaborate on their answers. I learnt from this audience feedback, that everybody enjoyed the opening of the documentary, especially with the medium close up shot of the girl pushing the books over. Our group liked this too and when deciding which clips to use, we knew we wanted to keep this scene. Furthermore, they thought that the documentary was informative as we included a range of different facts and statistics. This was something that we liked and made sure to include in our documentary frequently. We used this in the beginning as an opening fact to give an understanding into our topic and we found that our audience liked this aspect. We also used facts in order to conclude our results from our voting box.

One aspect of audience feedback we gained showed us that we had achieved our aims as we involved a range of people including the younger and older generations. We consciously tried to do this but the only people we could interview in college that were experts happened to be white women, who were relevant to our topic, therefore sometimes we struggled to do this. Our audience also gave us an interest rating of 9 out of 10, this shows that a strength to our documentary is that we chose an interesting topic. I thought that one aspect we could have done better was to make the transitions between scenes smoother, however our audience did not seem to notice that as they said that the scenes blended well. We did change this before handing in our final copy of the documentary. This may just have been us being critical and looking into more detail than our audience did. Overall we did not have any negative reviews, which was good but it would have been good to gain an insight into something we could have improved on. We chose to include questions, which would cover a range of things from the music used, the opening, background footage, titles and more. We covered all the areas that we included in our documentary to get a rounded opinion.

We conducted a questionnaire alongside our focus group, and we did this during our media lesson to around 20 students. All students were in our target audience and the scale of the group meant that we could get a better view of what they thought along with our smaller focus group that was done previously. The first question asked was whether our audience liked the opening of our documentary. This was a unanimous yes response which was good because we could then see that our audience liked the visual representations of the stress that occurs with teenagers.

This question relates to the amount of background footage that we used and whether it was a good amount or not. The overall majority vote said ‘yes’ to a good amount of background footage being used. A smaller amount of people said ‘no’ and ‘kind of’ so taking this into account, we know that most people thought there was a good amount of background footage and some perhaps thought that there should have been more.

Most people said ‘yes’ to finding the use of statistics and facts informative, so this told us that the way we portrayed information across was successful. On the other hand, 1 person said no. So, from this we can see that perhaps too many statistics were used that a member of our target audience did not like and that the use of statistics on screen was not appealing to them. We have learnt from this question that our audience mostly liked this part of our documentary.

Our documentary title is ‘Are today’s teenagers the most stressed generation?’ and we look at how the different generations perceive issues that teenagers deal with and whether today’s teenagers have it more difficult. Every reply we got was a ‘yes’ response and that revealed that we had given a fair representation. I thought that the responses that we gained from this specific question meant that our documentary aims were successful as we had a good representation of different people with the way we executed research and interviews.

This question was about the music that was used in our documentary, so we could find out what our audience thought. However, when playing our documentary to our class through the speakers, rather than the headphones we used to edit our documentary, there were a few issues. We got a comment saying that somebody else had notice a few glitches so after doing our questionnaire, we went back to the computer to fix the audio problems. This did not take long and so getting the audience feedback was a vital part in making sure we did not miss any problems. It is always good to have somebody new watch our documentary and give comments because we have been working on it for while and may have become immune to issues which somebody else would pick up on. Therefore, audience feedback is a crucial element.

We tried to make our documentary as realistic as possible because our topic featured some serious issues such as anxiety and depression which is common in teenagers. We tried to create realism by conducting interviews, using facts and doing our own voting box research. We used real college students and experts as it is a documentary and not a film or fictional TV drama. I have learnt from this that our documentary was portrayed as realistic through the use of vox pops, and this is something that was imperative that we used.

We did face to face interviews to gain audience feedback for our magazine listing double page spread, we asked questions about the title (masthead), layout, pull quotes, images, colour scheme etc. The focus group we completed meant that we could control who we asked to be in our feedback, and we made sure they were people in our target audience. Hence, from these questions we could see what the audience thought about our magazine and the ways in which we could improve. The first question was ‘Does the masthead pull you into reading the article?’ and the effect of this is that the masthead should be large and stand out, however it should still be related to the topic of the article. The masthead is large and one person in our focus group said the font linked in to the theme of school and education. Teenagers are most likely to be in school or college so I was pleased with this comment as it meant that our theme is prominent and stands out without needing to read the article. The layout according to our audience is ‘simplistic’ and I find this to be a compliment as then all the text is clear and easy to read along with it being appealing due to the use of images. Henceforth, our audience has told us that the layout is a strength to our magazine. One suggestion was to bring out the pull quote from the page further, so we acted on this by adding a ‘stroke’ to our text, which essentially means adding a shadow in order to bring that text off the page. We liked the positioning of the pull quotes and decided to keep them where they were. One weakness of our magazine is that it was hard to see some of the text, at the bottom of the double page spread. Learning this, we made some parts bigger in order for them to be seen more clearly.

Masthead

Pull quoteByline

Simplistic text layout