With regards to audience feedback, we had to create a questionnaire at the beginning of our coursework to mainly gather general information on what the audience would expect to see in an RnB/Hip-Hop music video, which in theory would guide us on who our demographic audience were going to be in order to get the necessary feedback we initially intended from our construction stage, finalised digipak and advert, and music video. I decided to use a class of A2 students who were also studying media because I felt I would be able to gather more professional constructive feedback, and by using a media class, it could have potentially allowed me to analyse fair honest feedback that would generally not be passive due to experience. We realised that an average age range of 16-18 years olds are most likely to watch and RnB/Hip-Hop context. This allowed me to therefore confirm the target audience in which to base our music video on, however to have detailed evidence that this was correct, I handed the questionnaires to 9 pupils from age ranging 16- 20 years of age. I used 5 boys and 4 girls; however I didn't feel that it would create a negative impact towards the feedback.
Our initial intentions were to not focus our music video purely towards a specific genre because we wanted to promote our video to all genres creating a bigger target audience thus leading us to more varied feedback. We also didn't decide to choose more males to females or females to males when it came to the questionnaires. This was so that we could generalise our feedback fairly and honestly.
When we gathered the results from the target audiences questionnaires, there was one particular question that we were keen to look into in terms constructive feedback. This was the question “what in your opinions worked best throughout the music video”. From the results of the music video expectations question it showed that varied use of camera shots (such as shots of the performer and artists singing), locations, actors, and narrative were most frequently put down as the answer. This was vital to us as it allowed us as a group to decide and take into consideration, what aspects of the music video worked and what would need changing to successfully appeal the video to our intended target audience.
In the second question which "what did you enjoy most about the music video. Why?", we noticed that the most common answer was the narrative and how the excitement of the enigma kept the audience entertained and Intrigued to find out the conclusion and whether the narrative had a deeper meaning behind it.
From the results of these questions we were then able to make bar charts to mark the percentage of each answer given. This was good in terms of gaining an insight into the consumption of music videos and gaining a variety of different answers/results in which we were able to make a decision on what we needed to include in our music video/ancillary tasks in order to target an audience effectively.
Another question we were able to convert into a graph chart to gain an easier perspective on the results was for the question "what would you rate the music video out of 10?”.
We were very pleased and surprised with the results from this questionnaire as we were a bit sceptical on how they were going to judge it. As we can see the majority of the pupils rated our video 7/10 with even a few pupils rating it 8 and 9/10. This gave us great confidence as a felt that we had achieved our intention of creating a video music that the target audience would enjoy.
During the process of our music video, we frequently received feedback from our teacher and pupils within our media studies course. At first the majority of the feedback which was said a lot was of the ratio of narrative to performance shots. Over the months we focused purely on the narrative part of the video with only very few performance shots. We took this into consideration and within a few weeks, we gathered enough quality creative performance shots and replaced some of the unnecessary narrative with the new creative performance footage. However we still needed to focus on intending to stick to the conventions of an RnB genre music video consisting of a balanced ratio of narrative to performance shots. Another criticism that the majority of the pupils said to improve on was the too frequent uses of natural lighting. They explained that we were too dependent on using natural lighting and didn't at that stage explore the uses of artificial lighting. This we took into consideration and explored new ways and techniques of using artificial lighting. One example was of the performance shot of the singer tom. We decided to shoot his performances in a music studio to empathise his importance as an artist and allowed us to use the new lighting techniques.
However there were a few shot in which we wanted to keep for the finalised video. We had to overcome this by editing the footage on the editing software after-effects, to enhance the brightness on the particular shots.
we were very keen on finalising this footage as it created a sense of isolation yet, the water empathises the relaxation of the shot which could possible aid the audience to reflect of what the singer is saying.however this was the shot which people stressed most about how it was too dark and couldn't precisely see the lip syncing from the singer. therefore we used the lighting effect tool on after effect to highlight the artist and brightened his appearance.
We uploaded our finished music video onto websites such as YouTube and Facebook with the help of our parents and friends as well. We collected all types of feedback such as constructive and critical feedback as well as positive feedback. Here are some images of the feedback we received off the website Facebook:
The feedback we received from facebook were all very positive, however there were some more constructive responses than others. Despite this, I personally was very grateful and surprised to receive as many comments as we did, which were all fair and very positive which we were pleased about.
One comment in particular was in my view a exciting and professional positive feedback:
"Loved it!! Showing the social degradation and breakdown of respect in modern times, but proving that not all young people are the same. Liked the 'concrete jungle' juxtaposed to the open country and feeling of freedom, giving a feeling of hope and escape from the inner city social problems."
In my opinions it is clear that this comment is very professional and has clearly been taken into much consideration about what the person was going to write. This was perhaps the most informative comment we received as it was positive, yet they completely understood the message we set out to portray. This suggests that not only have we achieved the right target audience, but we were able to get the appropriate responses we wanted from them.
We then uploaded the video onto “YouTube” to try an increase the amount of views and increasing the percentage of getting any constructive feedback.
Despite getting over 300 views from the video, we only received two comments on YouTube. Not only this, but the comments though pleasing and positive, did not provide us with any constructive feedback. The reason why we uploaded our music video to YouTube is because we wanted to access a wider target audience and also to gain as much constructive feedback as we could to help with the evaluation of our music video although we did not achieve any constructive feedback.
We also wanted to receive as much constructive feedback as possible for our ancillary task. Therefore we created a similar questionnaire to video, except for the ancillary task. We wanted again, to gather onset opinion towards the digipak and magazine advert
I handed the questionnaires to 9 pupils again, age ranging from 16- 20 years of age and I used 5 boys and 4 girls, yet I didn't feel that it would create a negative impact towards the feedback.
We decided to be more personal on their own views of our digipak instead of just general questions. This would be more difficult to summarise, however it gives us more detailed constructive feedback that we can rely on.
We asked a similar question when observing our music video questionnaire. We ask "what do you most likely expect to see from an RnB digipak music album?”. We decided to use this question to create it into a closed questionnaire which the result we received from the pupils, allowed us to create a graph to show the results and what they indicated.
We noticed from this graph that everyone who took part in completing the questionnaire said that the names and the artist/s and album are the most likely convention to see within a digipak music album. Surprisingly only 4 pupils said that colour is likely to be seen from a music album, and only 3 would expect to see a logo. These results gave us a brief but constructive feedback to take into consideration and the highest priority (which we achieved) is to include the name of the artist/s and they're album.
After reviewing all of the feedback I received there were many aspects which I was pleased about, all were very constructive and we were praised by how professional our music video turned out to be. Also the audience admired our professional editing which they said suited well with the pace of the video, and how clearly we sent the message across to the audience. The locations worked surprisingly well for example the train station shots worked well in conjunction with the narrative and lyrics of the song and also the concert worked very well as it made the video seem much more realistic. I also felt that the performance shots worked well with the use of varied shots such as hand held shot to empathise the fast paced sequences, low angle and high angle to suggest importance and status, and the use of tracking shots used on the main character in the running sequences and in the concert.
Overall I was pleased with the surprising amount of praise given with regards to the professionalism we created towards the digipak and magazine advert. When analysing the ancillary task questionnaire results, I notice that the questions were more open minded thus allowing the pupils to write more constructive and detailed feedback for myself and my group to observe. An answer that one of the pupils wrote was that the digipak created a message of awareness and an objective to try and reach a personal goal. This is exactly what I was hoping for as a result from the questionnaire as it shows a clear indication that the audience understood the message we tried to send out. One constructive feedback I received which I thought was useful was that in the question “how could you improve it?”, one pupil commented saying that the artists and album’s name needed to be bolder, and also more creative editing was needed on the front cover of the digiapk. I agree with this comment and do believe if given the opportunity, to correct these suggestions which could possible enhance the professional appearance towards the digipak.
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