Evaluation 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

         As I mentioned before, my target audience for my products are aged between 16 and 25, although there would be a secondary audience of females also aged between 16 and 25. I find that feedback is a key and one of the most important parts of making any product, as without positive feedback the product cannot be considered successful, as it does not appeal to the intended target audience. However, negative feedback and constructive criticism is just as important as it allows you to go back to your products and improve certain aspects that could have been done better and therefore be more appealing to my intended target audience. Due to my beliefs on feedback, throughout the stages of creating my video, digipak and magazine advert, I asked a wide variety of people on what they thought of my products, initially from my primary and secondary target audiences, to people ranging in age and social beliefs. This helped me get an insight into what people thought of my product and whether it would be commercially accepted or not. I managed to gather feedback through videoing family and friends’ reactions and asking people over the Internet who would typically fit my target audience. I also manage to obtain peoples thoughts on my products through posting them online on websites such as Blogger, Youtube, Vimeo, Tumblr and Facebook, where people could comment and rate my productions, which helped me get statistics on what worked well for the best audience response. It appeared to me that some sites were better at displaying feedback than others, although when using them together I could generate accurate results on what people thought of my products. For example, if I created an unlisted YouTube link and shared it on Facebook, I could then see how many people watched my video from the post, as well as interactions such as ‘likes’ on either the Facebook post or the video on YouTube itself. I could then get more in depth feedback by people commenting, as well as sharing the link to people on the private chat feature on Facebook, where they can reply directly to me. I found that for me personally, Facebook was the best form of feedback I could get as most of the people I am connected with on there are people from my primary target audience. Although when making decisions on my music video, I chose to focus on it myself rather than posting it online for a number of reasons, the main being the time it would take to upload each version would be too long for what it’s worth. The second reason would be that if I had too many mixed opinions, I would confuse myself and try to incorporate them all as best I can, which would turn out to be counter productive. Instead, I finished my video how I wanted it to look, and then uploaded it for feedback. Furthermore, I asked family members and friends in face-to-face conversations, as I could also tell from their facial expressions and body language as to how they feel towards the video. They were also more likely to be honest with me with what to improve on, even if it was little things such as the lighting in a shot. In addition, the people who helped me shoot and set up for the video were particularly interested to see the final product, as well as having their own idea of what the video would look like, so they also had an input on what my final product turned out to look like.

Whilst putting the final colour adjustments on my video, I got regular feedback from my primary target audience about which looked better, or what would look better. To do this I exported a few versions of the same clip, the difference being the amount of effect used, in most cases the contrast, and then showed them to various people for their thoughts and which clip they preferred. The main part of my video this was most useful was the ending with the red and black performance scenes as I was undecided between making it look really dark and mysterious yet natural, or going with the version that ended up in my final finished product. In addition, audience feedback helped me decide which shots were going to work best, when I showed classmates the footage I had shot, I took notes of their reactions and how the different shots made them respond. Overall I had around an hour and a half of footage to use for my video, although only needed five minutes for my final product, so showing people all of the footage would have been difficult, and despite not showing people the draft versions it would have been very useful to get additional feedback on the music video as a whole rather than individual scenes as they would have a better insight to the storyline and other shots than will run with the clips they have seen, therefore it might have changed their opinion on the shots. However, I feel that it was a risk that paid off, as I am very pleased with my finished video and the feedback I have received since finishing it.