Question 3 Part 2

By Larelle Benjamin-Forrester

According to Stuart Hall’s reception theory, there are three different types of reception models which refers to the way

people read texts. The three readings consist of the dominant, negotiated and oppositional. A

dominant/preferred reading is one whereby the reader accepts the reading in comparison to an oppositional

reading whereby the reader understands the reading but does not share the texts code and instead rejects it. This

type of reader has a oppositional view to the dominant code due to their social situation which influences them.

Lastly, the negotiated reading accepts the reading and partly shares it but can resist or modify it in order for it to reflect

their experiences and interests. By understanding these reception models, I prepared myself for the type of feedback

we was going to receive because people’s cultural and life experiences can be highly influential on the way they

interpret media texts. I also took into account that people weren’t passive and text was not going to be passively

accepted.

Our target audience is young people between the ages of 16-22 year olds (teenagers and young adults) who were able to relate

to the themes and topics that Big Quan raps about. However for our questionnaire, we chose to ask our target audience as well as others because there was a likelihood that the three

tasks could have attracted older people or even younger people.

Target Audience

Furthermore it could have attracted

people who preferred a different genre of music yet had a keen interest

in designing and perhaps liked the

presentation of our ancillary tasks.

Therefore we didn’t make a decision to interview people

from a cross section of society or niche

market.

I found the audience feedback varied for each of the three tasks. This goes

as follows:

Music Video

Overall everyone enjoyed watching the music video which was good because it showed that it reflected the style of the music and genre which was R’n’B and Hip-Hop. It was also made successful through the use of camera work and editing. Our music video was also

influential in the sense that it encouraged our viewers to buy the digipak and view the website. The fact that it did had the ability to do this illustrated that what it presented left the audience wanting more. This links into the basic theme of Uses and Gratification and made evident that people actually use media to meet specific gratifications. In this case, our music video brought on this need to find out more about the artist which led them to

take interest in our ancillary tasks. One disadvantage to the video was however that it was much shorter than other existing media texts.

Ancillary TasksBoth the digipak and website

received high results in terms of reflecting the genre of our music.

They also were rated highly on the standard of graphics which showed that our editing skills

came as an advantage to the work we produced. However, the

digipak in contrast to the music video and website wasn’t as

successful in promoting the artist which led me to think that it

probably needed to include more than what we did.

Despite of this the connection between all three products was

present and was said to be through the constant colour

scheme (in the ancillary tasks), the logo, pictures of the artist and

font.

Improvements

Out of all three tasks the music video had the most suggestions on ways to increase the audience appeal. This consisted of adding more editing effects to make it appear

more interesting. One very important suggestion was to be careful of the use of props which was stated by someone who expressed that ‘the artist used a mic but

kept moving the mic away from his mouth whilst rapping which a normal artist wouldn’t do’. After looking back on my music video, I discovered that this was

actually true and would be one definite change we would make to the music video. We also received a comment that ‘the website was quite basic’ which was quite

surprising considering all the ideas we put into it. Nonetheless we took this criticism as a positive one and wish they had said what could have been added in order to

find out what it lacked.

Conclusion

To conclude, I thought it was very essential for my group and I to receive audience feedback because it initially

was for them. It also felt good as creator of these products to see how

effective our music video and ancillary tasks actually were. Overall, I think we did a good job and if we had to make

any changes to what we had produced, would definitely know the right way of

going about it.