Question 3 What have you learnt from your audience feedback

Audience feedback was something I was very keen to get through out the whole process of my ad-vanced portfolio, as I see no point in creating a product if you don't know whether it will appeal to your target audience.

After completing the first draft of your music video I knew it was important to show it to our target audience (16-19 year olds), I thought the easiest way to do this was to go to different groups of peo-ple at lunch time, play them the video and ask them two simple questions, ‘what they like about the video’ and ‘what we can do to improve.’ We kept the questions the same for ever person we asked to make sure we could easily compare our findings. Out of the 25 people we asked I decided it would be a good idea to make a video that generally summed up the opinions and feedback we got from out audience. I went back around particular individuals and asked if I could film their responses.

From our first batch of audience feedback from both our target audience and teachers we learnt that the opening of our video was strong and that towards the end it lost significance and meaning. This was feedback we took on board, we knew that our ending never really had a definitive point as we had taken such strong inspiration from the opening of pretty woman for the opening of our video. We decided we should re film in order to meet the needs of our target audience, I realised that we never really showed the audience how the prostitutes night ended, so when the music slowed down the audience will now see the prostitute back at home, removing her make up and clothes. I believe since taking the audience feedback on board our ending is now considerably stronger and works well with the rest of the video.

One piece of feedback gained from interviewing our target audience was that particular shots, in particular the shots in town seemed to drag and would be more effect if they were cut down or even possibly cut out completely and replaced with something more effective. We discussed this with your teachers and they confirmed that we could possibly use that section of the video far more ef-fectively if we re film and created more of definitive story line, using the lyrics from a video. We decided to take on board this feedback and instead of filming the prostitute walking around town, we filmed her walking up to a clients car and getting in, this fitted in with the lyrics far better than the shots we had before and made the story line in the video a lot strong.

We decided to remove another section of our video after completing audience research, this was the scene that took place in the takeaway. From out feedback be learned that this scene looked very staged and unnatural and the audience didn't really understand why it was there. We felt that it was a good idea on paper, but unfortunately didn't transfer well when it came it filming and since it was the general consensus of your target audience I didn't feel it had a place in the final version of the video, as the video needs to appeal to the target audience.

Another time in which I turned to audience feedback was selecting the style of font to include on my digipak and advert, I wanted to use the same font on both to show the audience that they were connected. I went the font website dafont.com to select 3 fonts that I thought would work best for the ancillary tasks, I then created a simple questionnaire, which required the participant to select which font they thought would work best on a digipak and advert. As these was a reasonably small task which was quick for the audience to answer I decided to ask 50 members of our target audience (16-19 year olds) to fill out the survey. The results were as follows

27/50 people I surveyed selected the font called ‘Bebas Neue.I’m aware that in the grand scheme of things the font I pick is a very small aspect of the final piece, however fonts are a way in which you can draw audiences in so I felt it was important to take the audience feedback on board and selected the font that target audience taught best fitted a digipak and advert.

A final time in which I took audience feedback on board was when finalising my digipak and ad-vert. Originally we had gone with the themes of a quite minimalist digipak and advert focuses on trees in the autumn, this time before getting feedback from our target audience we got feedback from our teachers, from which we were told there wasn't a clear and significant link between our ancillary tasks and our music video. Upon this feedback I decided to create a second digipak and advert, in which I would focus on creating a stronger link between both pieces of work. I thought the best way to show this was by using an actor and locations featured within the music video. I took inspiration for the Arctic Monkeys album cover for ‘ Whatever people say I am, thats what I’m not’ which had a mid shot of a male on the front and a similar shot on the back. I didn't want to blindly follow this so had a mid shot of the pimp on the cover and the back of the album was him turned around, I feel this worked very well. The background of the shots were cover in clippings

from magazines and thought this was really unique and interesting so used it on both inside panels of the digipak. This location is scene within the video so I believe it will help the audience to under-stand the connection between all there pieces. I also took the image from the inside panels and used it as a background for the advert, as personally I don't like having an artist plastered everywhere as it makes it moe about their appearance than the music.

After creating both combinations of digipaks and adverts I created another simple surveyed in which I showed 40 members of our target audience (16-19 year olds) which combination of digi-paks and adverts they preferred, digipak and advert 1, trees or digipak and advert 2, the pimp

The general feedback was that they liked how all the pieces connected in the secondcombination and that they liked the connection between the trees and the prostitute, but didn't feel it was strong enough. They also felt that the second combination was far more eye catching, due to brighter colours being used. Based on audience feedback I have deiced to go with the second com-bination for my final digipak and advert.

However my teachers didn't like the style of the 4 panel digipak or the pictures used on the digipak and advert, for that reason I created a third digipak and advert combination. Like always I wanted to show the clear connection between the two products, as well as the video. Upon discussion with my teachers I decided to go with a 6 panel digipak this time instead of a 4 panel digipak. Although our audience feedback like it, I decided to scrap the pictures of the pimp and focus solely on the prostitute. After creating a the digipak and advert I sent it to 20 16-19 years olds through social me-dia to get their response. Although this is considerably less than the other times I have gained audi-ence feedback I felt it was acceptable due to the time consecrates and still gave me things to work on. One piece of feedback I gained from a lot of the people I asked was that the black font I was us-ing didn't work well with the lightness of the pictures, they suggested I used white instead, I decided to take this piece of audience feedback on board and changed the font colour to white for my final digipak and advert. Another piece of audience feedback I took on board was where to position the lyrics on the digipak. Originally I was thinking off spreading the lyrics out across all three of the in-side panels, this was simply because the lyrics were too long to fit on one panel alone. My audience

feedback showed me that they would prefer if the lyrics were altogether on one panel. Due to the feedback I place all of the lyrics on the middle inside panel, where the disc would go.

Overall I feel audience feedback has been very beneficial throughout this whole process, this is be-cause it as enabled me to make sure my is at the best standard to attract my target audience.