Monday 18 April 2011

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?









    The first bit of audience feedback we did was to narrow down our target audience, and discover whether the age group we thought would like the 19/2000 Soulchild remix which was between 15 - 24, actually did.

    We had thought this would be our target audience mostly because of the genre, hybrid between hiphop and dance. Original Gorillaz fans would be quite a bit older than 15-24 now as the band first released records in 1988. Though as were not using an original Gorillaz track we figured they're not our main target audience, however they could be a secondary target audience.

    We used a quick questionnaire to find out whether students aged 17-18 recognised the record, if they could establish which genre it is and if they liked it. We filmed their responses and uploaded the video to Youtube, and then annotated using the annotation tool.


    From this we found that on the whole people recognised the song but were unable to tell us the artist or song title, unless they were existing Gorillaz fans. This was disappointing although the majority claimed to like the track and therefore still matched our thoughts on target audience.

    Their feedback on what they expected to see in a music video for the track was useful because some of their ideas were very similar to our own. This would suggest that a person of that age would like our music video and find it authentic.

    We never gained any audience feedback from a possible secondary audience, out of our target audience age range. Perhaps if we were to re-do the research and planning we could have gained some feedback from an older audience, to see how they would respond, and whether they would follow a preferred reading of the video. However their feedback wouldn't be as relevant because they aren't our primary target audience.

    Our audience feedback for our music video was sought from various sources:
    • Class screenings
    • Screenings to other media students
    • Screenings to our year group and also the year below
    • Youtube
    • Facebook
    Each of these resulted in different types of audience feedback, for example:
    • Media students were happier to constructively criticise our work meaning we could use there feedback to improve our work.
    • Screening the video to the students in other media classes whilst we weren't present resulted in even more criticism which suggests perhaps our class were trying to be nice to beth and myself.
    • Although one positive with screening to the other class was that they hadn't seen our work as many times as our own class which meant that they were giving feedback in a more realistic setting as opposed to our class who seemed to be analysing every detail which wouldn't happen with a general viewing in the real world.
    • Other sixth form students in general were less willing to criticise, we could however ask them specific questions such as 'do you follow this reading' and see whether they responded positively or negatively.
    • Very few people gave feedback via Youtube, which meant that it was difficult to use their feedback for any specific purpose, though we in total received 3 positive comments and 6 likes on the final draft and final cut out of a supposed 431 views.
    • Facebook friends were more willing to give feedback although due to the social aspect of the site not all of it was necessarily feedback on the video, friends were also less likely to criticise.
    • Youtube users who left comments are anonymous so we were unable to tell what age group was giving us audience feedback.
    • Facebook was better for this, as the comments left were from friends aged within our target audience group 15-24.
      • However Youtube offers a statistical view of the video views from other people which tells us whether they have been linked from Facebook which is a good sign that uploading it to that social networking site was a good choice.
      • Youtube also provided us with this statistic:

      Audiences - This video is most popular with:

      Gender Age
      Male 13-17

      which matches what we had previously thought in terms of target audience and therefore helps us anchor that. 
      The music video:

      After gaining audience feedback from a small group of students in the other media class with which we ran through our entire music video in detail we gained this audience feedback:

      This was the rough cut that they saw:

      Rough Cut 3 from Beth Cooper on Vimeo.


      These are the suggestions they made as to what we could edit and improve upon:
      • Cut back to the phone ringing and add in SFX to the shots to mimic the vibrations of the phone, in the opening scenes of mise en scene close ups.
      • Also add diegetic sound of the phones vibrations.
      • Reverse the shot of the light bulbs to focused, then blurred, as this will tie better with our central protagonist, Callum waking up.
      • Alter the sequence of shots to mix both mise en scene, bottles and cigarette packets etc with the extras cast asleep.
      • Add more lip-syncing as Callum gets dressed.
      • More shot variation during the fridge scene.
      • Possibly add a close up shot of Callum opening the can, and using SFX put his face on the can lid.
      • Possibly repeat the motion of the fridge shutting to match the beat, similar to the repetition of Callum running down the stairs
      • Overlay Callum taking the cigarette of the girl sleeping on the floor to mask the slight shake of the camera
      • De-saturation of red hues on the skateboarding scene
      • Add more ghost trails on the long shots from the skateboarding scene or possibly just on the jumps
      • Re-shoot the shot of the CD player in the car
      • Add shots of the road, to increase shot variation in the car scene
      • Re-shoot the scene in which Callum and Simon arrive at the party, as the shots are too long, they're poorly framed and they don't flow well into the next sequence of shots from the house party.
      • Mix together shots of the rave and the kitchen scene with fast pace editing to create a more slowing transition.
      • Alter the main shot of transition from our cast member Megan, to the DJ, to a transition of Megan to Megan down in the rave which would flow better.
      • Layer some of the HD shots from the rave 
      • Link the HD shots to the fish-eye lens by panning down into a bottle creating a circular frame which is similar.
      • Also improve the transition between the fish-eye lens and the scene with Callum and our female cast member Vicky going upstairs in a similar way.
      • Re-shoot the ending to make it less abrupt, we will film Callum putting his hand to the camera to signify the end.
      This is the final draft and as you can see we took on board what the group said about the following scenes and edited them accordingly:



      Here is the screening of our final cut which we presented to a group of sixth form students which fits our target audience age range.



      Following this screening it is clear that there is little left to be done to improve our video and therefore we can use it as our final cut.

      The ancillary texts:

      YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE

      Digipak



       This was the draft our our digipak which was discussed in the video.

      From this audience feedback it was clear that on our digipak we were missing a lot of the small details which go into creating a CD cover. For our final digipak we had to add all these in to make it authentic and like a real digipak production which was our brief.


      It was said that the theme of our digipak ties in well with our advert which is positive as this shows that our audience feel that the two work well together as a package despite the imagery not being identical.
      However it was suggested we could further improve the links between the two by matching some of the colours etc.
      There was a suggestion to tie in the youthful image and graffiti with the album texts with a spray can effect so we aimed to create a convincing spray can effect as we thought it was a great idea. To anchor that it was graffiti style we also added in an outline of a spray can.

      The sticker idea was also mention in this audience feedback session which is something which we chose to add to our digipak as it is an easy way to add any extra information about the special edition digipak which is separate to everything else. Also, as the sticker is a common convention of existing digiapak and CD cover examples, using the same technique makes our digipak look more authentic, like the real life examples.
      Magazine advert:

       



      This was the draft of our magazine advert which was discussed in the video.

      From that class discussion it was suggested that we:
      • Use the same pink text on more of the white text.
      • Make the text on the digipak features stand out more, for example: in shape of a record.
      • Re-order the writing as it is a little squished up.
      • Compress 'THE REMIXES' so that the edges of the letters aren't lost.
      Following the audience feedback we created one more draft with which we weren't happy and then exhibited our final draft which received positive feedback from a group of media students, which was why we eventually chose it.

      We gained less audience feedback from our ancillary texts as the process of producing them took less time, also we only gained feedback from media students. Given more time I think it could have been beneficial to gain more audience feedback by possibly uploading









        No comments:

        Post a Comment