Evaluation - Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I used an array of techniques to to gain some feedback from my target audience.

Feedback from an audience is significant in creating a successful piece of work, so I appreciated the positive comments and learnt from the negative ones.

I contacted my audience via Facebook, texting and phoning them, showing my work to my class and getting them to write down feedback and also asking a couple of friends to watch it in person and we recorded what they had to say.

Below are some written comments me and my partner collected as a result of our whole media class watching our video.

We got around twenty written replies back which is obviously a valid amount, I then scanned in a few which I felt were most relevant.

I then picked out the key points from the written comments...

We gained a lot of positive feedback on the whole, which could suggest our video was successful and enjoyably to watch.

Something I found from my whole range of audience feedback, was that almost everyone praised the editing and the way the footage was put together.

Some comments included - "Professional", “All the different shot types – really creative”, “The editing is excellent”, “Good use of editing”.

This is a good comment because one of my aims was to make the video appear "redundant" in a sense of it appearing like a real media product. For example, I avoided using hand-held camera techniques and jumpy editing because I wanted to avoid the audience taking an aberrant reading.

So this feedback has reinforced my confidence in my music video appearing professional and real.

I mentioned previously how I tried to be entropic with my video, and added effects such as the gun shooting out sparks and our actor spitting on the camera, these were highlighted by a few of my audience as successful moments in the video.

I'm glad the audience enjoyed this, because as it was quite entropic, it was risky as to whether people would enjoy it or not.

"The gun was cool" & “Love the toothbrushing bit!”

Interestingly I got a couple of comments that give the impression the visuals and audio work well together, "Video suits the music" & “Although the music and visuals aren't suppose to fit, they do. The music implies streets, crime etc. And this is illustrated in the video."

Even though these comments are positive, they are contradicted by a Facebook comment I got from someone directly in the target audience...

This comment is limited in detail I know, but because this person is genuinely the target audience in every sense, the comment is extremely valid - even more so than some of the more detailed comments by people outside the target audience.

This relates to Pierre Bourieu's theory on Cultural Capital. David Poyner in a sense has more knowledge on the subject of our song than other people who commented, this effected his reading on the text, and he highlighted how the audio doesn't quite work for him.

David's comment is quite simplistic yet it does make me think that maybe our song wasn't "hard" enough when considering our target audience. This is obviously a major issue as the song is the basis of where all the work escalates from.

Furthermore, some slightly negative comments I gained from the written comments were...

“Possibility of match on action at the end of the video”

“Could have been faster cuts – closer to the tempo of the song”

These comments were not focused on major issues which does not make me doubt the quality of my work too much, on the other hand if I had another chance to make the video, I would pay attention to these comments.
I am especially referring to the comment that talks about using "faster cuts", this is something I agree with. Using faster cuts would have made the video more appropriate to the style of the song, and essentially more attractive to the target audience.

This video shows two people commenting on my music video, interestingly, one of them is in the target audience (the young male) and the other is not (the young girl)

Firstly I looked at what the girl (Chloe) had to say, even though her comments are somewhat less important compared to the male that is in our target audience.

Chloe obviously likes our video - which is a good sign - "I thought it was really good!"
And she specifically likes the point where our actor is followed by the masked killer and he appears behind him momentarily.
"My favourite bit is when he's walking along and then the guy appears behind him in the mask"

This is our intended effect, and I think the fact that we have reached out to people beyond our target audience could be seen as a good thing.
In a business sense it could be seen as attracting more customers, hitting two birds with one stone.

Aron, the male in our target audience also liked the video.
He said... "I thought the angles were good, The timing of it was good, The storyline was good"
This is positive news, and the fact that he understood the storyline proves that we were able to relate to our target audience in a way they were familiar with.

I would say that from our audience feedback we have learnt that on the whole, our video was successful and enjoyable to watch to our target audience and even to an audience outside our target area.