What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout this A2 year, audience feedback has played a vital role in the development of my final products. In this answer I will chronologically discuss each piece of feedback at different stages of development and how it impacted my final products.

At the start of this year, I conducted target audience interviews and focus groups in order to establish what members of my target audience wanted to see from music videos in my genre specifically. From this research I found out that members from within my primary and secondary target audience “Like to see the artist within the video” and that if they didn’t see the artist, they probably wouldn’t respect the brand as much. Additionally, I discovered that they didn’t like to see “dance troops” as they found them to be too cliché and distracting from the main message of the video. As a result of this feedback, I decided to make the imagery in my video, simple yet classy, as I believe that it helped to promote the artist in a positive way.

After my target audience interviews, I pitched my idea to the class. The main piece of feedback that I received was to make sure the “narrative was heavily weighted” throughout the video to ensure that the story was portrayed well and that there was enough narrative to make an impact. However, at first I decided that I didn’t want to include a narrative, as I felt that it would spoil the classy theme I was trying to create, but after a while I felt that the video wasn’t very interesting, so I decided to take on board this feedback and I filmed a narrative section for my video. Looking back, I do believe that my video looks much better for having a narrative.

After my pitch, and taking suggestions on board I drafted out a storyboard. By doing this, it gave me more of an idea what my music video will look like. At this point, I didn’t include a narrative. By doing several drafts and presenting them to the class, helped me to improve and adapt my ideas, in order to make my video better and more suited to my target audience. When I showed my drafts to the class, they said that some of my ideas were too cliché and I needed to make it more unique. I feel that I managed to make my video more unique by deciding to use an older couple in my narrative, as opposed to a

young couple which would normally be seen in videos from this genre. By doing this, I feel that it has added more depth to my video, as it will make me the audience think more about the storyline.

Whilst in the editing process of my video, I was regularly given feedback from both my teacher and my peers. The feedback that stood out the most, was that I needed to add narrative into my video, as when I started editing, I didn’t have any intentions of including a narrative. So in order to make my video appeal to my TA more, I then decided to go out and film a narrative at the beach. When I added this in to the video, my peers said that it made the video have more meaning, suggesting that the audience would be more interested in the video as they would start to think about the narrative. However, they said that the start of my video was abrupt and that I needed to give it more context. I decided to make the shot longer so that the artist walks into the shot, making it less abrupt. When I showed this to my class again, they said that it started much smoother and was easy to understand. It was mentioned, however, that some of the transitions that I used were too simple, but I then explained that I chose to use simple transitions to create a classy aesthetic to my video. Why explaining this to my peers, it helped them to understand the main themes I was going for in my video.

After finishing my music video, I then went on to produce my ancillary tasks. I firstly sketched some drafts and showed the class. Their initial feedback was that “the adverts don’t fit with the classy theme” so I went away and redrafted the adverts out and came up with my final draft. I started with my digipak, I went out with my chosen artist from my video and took many photos to include within my ancillary tasks. When I showed the class the first digital draft of my digipak, they said that they liked the black and white contrast with the colour where the CD would fit as they thought it was a unique idea. Someone said they weren’t sure about the mix of different black and white tones, however, I believe that this difference doesn’t matter, therefore I decided not to change it. I ensured that I made the black and white theme prominent throughout my design to make sure that it all fitted together, to help establish brand identity. When making my advert, I couldn’t decide which picture to use, so I decided to make several drafts. When I showed these to the class, they voted for which ever one they thought fitted in with both my video and my digipak. Overall I am happy that the decision that was made was the right one, as I feel that both ancillary tasks fit together well.

After creating my ancillary tasks, I decided to share my music video online to receive feedback from a wider audience. However, I found this unhelpful, as I only received two pieces of external feedback. These were “the lip sync isn’t matched up as well as it could have been” which I was already aware of, and had done my best to fix. Additionally someone said that they “liked the short narrative inputs” which makes me glad that I took on board the suggestion of including a narrative in my video.

Overall I believe that audience feedback has played a very important role during the development of my music video and ancillary tasks, as I believe it has helped me to improve my final products and make them the best they could have been.