Thomas Madden

3. What have you learned from the audience research?

Throughout this project, to make sure the ideas that I was making in connection to this project, were coherent and concise I carried out a lot of audience research to try and source varied opinions. This ranged from Feedback and response sheets, to online survey polls such as poll daddy and survey monkey as well as social network feedback such as Flickr and Twitter. To ensure that I had even more opinions sourced I even used my email as a foundation, to see if I could get some response from people. Without carrying out this vast set of feedback, I think that I would have ended up creating a one dimensional project that was less rounded and what ended up as the final finished product.

CHATS

Amongst all of the other research I had interviews with my teachers that were recorded on camera and this allowed me to talk over any problems that I had and how I could potentially try and make a rectification to mistakes. This was specifically helpful when I spoke to Leanne about my project and how the connections towards Goodwin’s theory in practice were hard to find or add to my music video. Yet, after the discussion she suggested a series of intertextual links that would make my video connect to that principle. This resulted in me being able to intertextually referencing Madness’ “carrousel” music video to my music video as it looked back on nostalgic memories much like my video did. Without these discussion and the help of Leanne and her opinion throughout this project; my video would not have been as good and would have been neglected of a experienced teachers thoughts.

FEEDBACK SHEETS

The most helpful feedback that I think I received had to be the feedback sheets that were given to all the members of my class, to give feedback at both the first screening of the music video and the last screening of the digi-pak and the poster. This set of feedback was great for me as it allowed me to make any changes that people thought were necessary. Some feedback that specifically made me change the construction of my video, was trying to make the video artier so that it was more fluent on an artist frontier. Other changes that I made to the music video specifically after receiving the set of feedback was to re-shoot scenes were the lighting was off and it was difficult to distinguish what was going on. This ultimately made my video more successful, fluent and more appealing towards an audience.

This style of feedback though did help me to recognise what was actually really good about my video and how I could emphasis that even more. This included great comments and feedback on the outdoors locations as well as the colours of the trees. When I got this feedback I knew that this was successful and that I had to make the video even more successful by emphasising this even more, so specifically with the colours and tones I made them far brighter using effects on Final Cut Pro using the 3- way colour correction tool.

Some feedback that helped me to make my digi-pak and posters more successful was to when in Photoshop use the pipette tool to pick up orange from the front panel and to drop that colour into the back cover so the colour were continuous. This helped to tie the two together making it directly clear that this artist was one that was natural and organic through the tonal range. Similarly, to make this clear in the print poster I had to make sure there were browns and beiges.

ONLINE SURVEY PROVIDERS

From the feedback that I carried out online from service providers to source feedback on items, it was actually quite difficult to get people to respond to the pieces and this is because my account was not recognised as a business profile so, less people were actually exposed to the media thus, meaning that less people commented

and feedback was minimal. Although, it did show that some people commented and answered the polls, I found that the minimal audience that were exposed to it were possibly too small to make a big decision on the back of a small sample. I think that if I was on-going to use this feedback as more of a decision making site, I would of needed far more responses and replies and if I completed the project again I would have tried to make a lot more people comment on the video.

FLICKR

I think that the most successful platform that I put my music video on and got a lot of feedback had to be the social networking platforms which included: Twitter and Flickr. Flickr specifically proved to be successful because a great deal of people commented and made feedback on my Digipak, print posters and my music video.

From publishing my digi-pak online I received 16 favourites in total with people commenting on the success of using the vintage iconographical items such as the gramophone as well as two commenting on the success of the expressive CD designs in the bottom right hand corner. I'm was very happy with the response from the posters as it has made it even more clear to me that the idea of using old fashioned items that were somewhat considered a past time really worked with this style of artist and the use of effects is very significant in making the consumer feel a certain way when viewing the media. This was clear through the posters as I made the consumer feel very effeminate through both the colour patterns used and the layers on the poster such as the swirls.

My music video on Flickr received 32 favourites showing a great interest in the music video. I also had 9 comments in total on the video. Some people stated that they loved the videos and others said "superb", "great" and "I loved this" I was extremely happy with these comments as none of suggests changes are needed to occur. The most pleasing feedback, I received from Flickr was that the video was well produced. This made me feel extremely content, as I felt that I had done what I was setting out to accomplish. I think as a result of this feedback, I feel even happier with what I have produced individually on my own as to make something that looks well produced with smooth transitions is quite difficult.

From my series of print posters I got in total 28 favourites as well as 4 comments. I am extremely happy with the result of the favourites and the comments and I found that from sourcing the feedback there was a mixed opinion on what people thought, some thought that the pink was the most successful commenting on the post saying "pink :)" showing that they enjoyed the pink design the most, other commented excellent work, so I thought personally it was my decision to stick with what I felt was successful. This was because the opinions ended up being neutral agreeing with my decisions but I thought, to put the audiences research into my video I would use all four designs and have the pink as the main poster. I purposely didn't choose to de-select the other designs as I think that they show a more well-rounded representation of the artist and what she is about. For example without the oil painted (effect) poster I don't think that it is quite as explicit at saying the artist is about arty things, without watching the music video.

EMAIL AND TWITTER

There were also two other methods that I used to try and source feedback, although I didn’t specifically get a lot of responses from both, they proved worth doing. The first method was publishing my video on Twitter with the link to my video, hoping that anyone that read the tweet would click the link then message me commenting with feedback. This method got one reply stating, “This video is so good Tom! It looks like it was a load of fun to film and is very professional!:)” the person who commented on this is around 17 years of age meaning that she would fit my expected secondary audience; which I think means my video has translated well towards the audience that would buy into this artist; if the artist was real.

As well as using Twitter, I used emails to try and contact people outside of my media class, this also only received one piece of feedback, and the feedback was;

“I got mum and I to sit and watch your music video and we loved it. Mum commented that she loved the paintings and that you have real talent. She also mentioned the way it flows throughout, especially at the end when your sister goes to the tree that you had just painted. I really liked the projections as it worked well with the lip-syncing :-) The bit I also loved was the mirror shot, where Lauren applied and then took of the make up as it conveyed emotion.”

This feedback made me extremely happy, as my intention of using the art was to show to the audience that the musician was not just a one-dimensional sexualized object for men, which seems to be the current trend I am trying to reject. I was also happy that the feedback made comments about the success of the lip-syncing as that took me a while to complete as well as that I was happy that this interviewee mentioned that the mirror scene conveyed emotion as everyone in my class didn’t realize that. Meaning that they may have missed the emotive response because of the amount of times they had seen the video.