Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?
From the audience feedback I have gained, I learnt a lot in particular about peoples expectations of a rock music video. I began using audience feedback at the very start of the course as part of my research & planning towards my music video and ancillary tasks. It was important to gain audience feedback at this point so I had an understand of the expectations people would have. It also helped with the type of content I should have involved within my music video. I carried out a questionnaire which was handed to many participents to get involved in and I also decided to set up my questionnaire on social networking website, Facebook. I did this because lots of people use it and I could therefore gain answers as people may find it easier to use facebook rather than writing out their answers on a questionnaire.
From the questionnaires handed out at the beginning of the year, I found out the general expectations people have of a rock music video. As expected, the majority of feedback proved that the performance element within a music video showing a band and instruments is very much associated with rock music. From my questionnaire I also found out that people linked darker colours to rock music. I also found out that most people watched music videos on either the internet or TV.
Another piece of audience feedback I gained was from my treatment. The treatment was when as a group we had to present a pitch to the media class for our music video with the ideas we had so far. Through doing this we could then gain an understanding of what ideas were good, and it also gave people the oppurtunity to suggest ideas for our group. From our treatment we received some really encouraging feedback from the class. Our treatment really helped towards the production of our music video as it changed the basis of our main focus of the video. We began with the idea of a gig scene, which people pointed out would be hard to create due to the numbers of people involved and a possible venue could be hard to find.
We were always asking friends for feedback and a lot of the time this feedback was also good. This was very encouraging and pushed us to keep going with what we were doing. Originally there were two possible endings, and we put both in to get an idea of what people thought, and if they could possibly work together as a striking ending. There were two different shots, one of Charlottes arm lying amongst the magazine cuttings, and the other of Tom placing down his guitar on the amp. The feedback we got from people was that we needed to choose one ending as it looked too much and it would have a much better effect with just one ending. As we were not sure which ending to take we relied on audience feedback to help us make the right decision. The feedback told us that the shot of Tom putting down the bass guitar was a better ending to our music video, so we went with that shot for the ending.
As a group we were really struggling to come up with an ending to our video. We had footage but we wanted something more striking. When showing our almost finished video to both people from our media class, and people outside we came to realise we'd effectively produced a piece of work including Barthes Enigma Code within it. People informed us their views of our narrative and it came across differently to different people. This is good as people have all different interpretations of our video. To fit in with the obsessive theme our video contains, we ended up putting shots of Charlotte with some of the song lyrics written over her skin as it hints towards her obsession.
The last bit of audience feedback gained was from a screening. This invited the sixth form media students, teachers and students wanting to take media from the school. We handed out sheets with 2 questions on, these questions were:
1. What did you like about our music video?
2. What is your favourite part of our music video and why?
Here are some of the answers we got to those questions from the screening. Our feedback was very positive which made our group proud of the work we had produced.
Through gaining audience feedback, I have learnt there is always room for improvement as everyone has varied opinions. I've also learnt it is important to take the information received from audience feedback as positive criticism as people are suggesting ideas to help improve the work that is being produced.
