Evaluation Three

Q3 – What have you learned from audience feedback

During the process of creating our music video we consistently used audience feedback to influence us in both large and small choices.  The first feedback we got was very early in the process when we pitched our idea to our class. This feedback indicated that we should focus on the aspect of friendship between young women, as there were many other angles we looked at for our video, for example ethnicity and that one of the draws of our video was the idea of bright colours and therefore we should film during the day.

We then realised we had to re-pitch our idea, as during our storyboarding the idea had become much more absurdist and comedic than our original pitch. At this ‘re-pitch’ we received a lot of ideas, often conflicting. There was also a lot of worry expressed at the subjectivity of humour, however the feedback was mostly positive, therefore we decided to keep the humour, but cut some of the more absurd parts, for example just having the trowel in the coat rather than the man regurgitating it. However, we kept ideas such as the compass being draw but the characters still being able to find their way. Lots of the suggestions we got in this pitch were unrealistic or outside or skill set, such as Claymation.

We then got audience feedback on a just the last shot. The feedback was unanimous that the first shot better than the second. Singular people also raised issues over a few specific moments, such as one shot that was out of focus and that the shot with the spade in the coat was too long. However, when these issues were raised, the majority of people in the group disagreed. This is one of the reasons I believe that focus groups work better than anonymous surveys as you can more easily gauge the majority opinion.

Feedback from singular people that have knowledge of editing was also helpful. When we asked one person in our class to give feedback on our video, during the editing process, she found technical errors, such as the fact one shot was slightly too long or slightly off beat. This meant that we could better refine our video and make the editing more precise.

When we had finished editing we had a final showcase to our class. They had generally positive comments, saying that the overexaggerated characters fit song and genre the colours gave it a more carefree feeling and that the characters and story make it funny, and that they couldn’t see any errors, therefore we knew we did not need to make any more edits.

I also collected survey formatted audience feedback using survey monkey, and distributed it through snapchat. Unfortunately, this was not very successful, which I believe was due to the format the survey was l in when opened in snapchat, as you could only see the first question, which 5x (19:3) more people answered than the subsequent questions. Due to the sporadic responses the quantitative data was virtually useless, however the qualitative data was useful as we could respond to their feedback and edit accordingly.

In my ancillary tasks, I created two versions of my magazine advert and three versions of my digipak. For my magazine advert the views was very biased on one design therefore I used the full design, with minimal edits. However, for my digipak, there was support for different elements of different designs therefore I combined the ideas of the three initial versions to create the final product.

In conclusion audience feedback was crucial in learning what our audience liked, and where there were elements that they disliked or were risky to attempt. Having feedback from audience knowledgeable in editing was also vital, as having an opinion of an outside editor was invaluable for spotting mistakes we had missed.