Evaluation Q3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Target Audience…It is important that during this project I gained lots of feedback from my target audience. The target audience for our video is teenagers aged from around 14-20. Initially we were aiming our video at girls as they are the people who are most likely to listen to pop rock/alternative rock. However, in order to make it appeal to a mass audience, we believe that some teenage guys may enjoy watching it too. By gaining audience feedback, it has allowed me to improve on my products and it ensures that my products will appeal to the target audience well. I gained audience feedback in many ways including: polls, social networking, visiting classes, showing teachers and peers and also getting lots of feedback along the way from friends. Below I have created a wordle, which shows what type of people my products are aimed at...

Polls…To easily gain people’s opinions, I created two polls on my blog at the start of this project. I wanted to find out whether people liked our chosen song and whether they liked the storyline that we had planned. From this, I was able to find out whether my video had a chance of being successful or not. As you can see 48/56 people said they liked our chosen. This is important because if the target audience didn’t like the song then they are less likely to actually watch the video. In the other poll 42/45 people said they liked the storyline for our video. Again, this is important because if they don’t find the storyline appealing then they won’t be interested in watching the video. By creating polls, I can easily find out different people opinions about my ideas. They are quick and easy to create and have been useful to me. If the majority didn’t like the chosen song, then I would consider changing my ideas in order to make it more appealing to my target audience. I have learnt that obviously not everyone enjoys the same type of music and not everyone likes a ‘love’ storyline as there are some ‘no’ and ‘not sure’. However, from this I can see that the plans for our video appeal to the majority of people and therefore will hopefully be successful.

To encourage people to vote on my polls, I did a post of facebook. This is a good way to easily and quickly reach my target audience…

Friends/Peers…During this project, audience feedback has been extremely useful. Along the way, I have been talking with friend asking for their opinions. As well as showing my product to the class to gain the opinions of my peers. From doing this, it has allowed me to gain honest critical feedback about each of my products. I have learnt how important it is for my product to appeal to the intended audience as if it doesn’t appeal to them it means my products will be unsuccessful if were to be produced for real. Feedback from my friend and peers has really helped me to improve my products and in the following slides I will be showing the progression of them.

To the left are some of my friends giving me some feedback. As they attend the same school, I can easily talk to them at any point. They have all provided me with good useful feedback during this project. In the left of the image, is Tom, the actor from our video. I decided to get feedback from him about my ancillary tasks as he is present in the video and will therefore be able to relate to the video well.

Also, I spoke to our artists, Jonny (Jono) a lot, who also provided me with lots of good critical feedback. His responses were honest and gave me more ideas on how to improve. I think it is important to gain feedback from him as he is the main feature in the video, therefore he knows the video really well. Also, I felt it was nice to show our actors the final products and to get an idea as to what they think of it.

Social Networking…I put a copy of our rough cut onto facebook in order to find out what our target audience thought of it. I used facebook as it is a popular social networking site, where the majority of users are aged around 14-20. This allows me to easily and quickly access feedback and shows how the development of web 2.0 has helped harness this. The feedback that I got was very positive and it made me feel more confident about my product. Although the video was more specifically aimed at girls, I learnt from the comments that there was a mix of both genders who found the video appealing.

The two charts above show why I decided to use facebook to gain some feedback. As you can see, the time people spend on social networking sites is rapidly increasing, meaning that feedback is very instant and feedback would be readily available. From the pie chart, you can clearly see the divide of the different age groups that use social networking sites. The target audience for my video are the most common users, showing how useful social networking is in being able to easily reach my target audience.

Most of the feedback that I received was very positive so not many changes had to be made. However, I did speak to friends so they can truthfully tell me what they thought of it. We decided that the timing could be improved slightly, and we could add a few more transitions, as well as edit the brightness and contrast of a few more shots.

Screen Shots…

Here are some screen shots of the different websites where I published the video in order to get some feedback. Facebook was the most useful as I gained useful feedback from friends. Using twitter is also another way to gain some feedback, as shown in the screen shot in the top right. I published our final video on Youtube, this allows many people to search and view for the video. Again, it is a way to gain useful feedback from others as Youtube is popular with people within our target audience.

Video Changes…The majority enjoyed our video and couldn’t think of much changes that needed to be done. Some thought the timing was slightly out, so we ensured to improve on this. Also, we decided to add more transitions to some of the shots, as well as edit the brightness and contrast of some. By doing this, it helps to make the shots more appealing to the audience and also improves the overall flow of the video.

The transitions we added include cross dissolve and cross blur. We added the cross dissolve transition when the shots linked to one another, such as the bits of the couple together. We added the cross blur transition when it contrasts from Jess and Jonny’s new life's. By doing this, it ensure that the video flows better from one shot to another.

We changed the exposure, brightness, contrast and saturation of some of the shots. By doing this it helps to make each of the shots more appealing and eye catching. It helps to make each shot more varied and interesting for viewers. Here are some of the shots where we have changed the adjustments of the shot…

Classes…Gaining audience feedback was very beneficial. I learnt about how important audience feedback is and the fact that the text has no meaning until it is decoded by an audience. Everyone is different and therefore there is going to be a variation in the ways which different people decode and read the text. The way I, the producer may read the text may be totally different to how the audience read it. Therefore, in order to try and make the audience read the text in similar ways, I have had to use recognised forms and convention so that the target audience read the text in the ways that I aim for them to. This is known as ‘preferred reading’, one of Stuart Hall’s theories.

I showed my video to a number of younger classes; year 8,9,10,11. I wanted to see how they read the video and whether they respond in the way in which I planned. From this, I found that I had been successful, as everyone's preferred readings of the text were fairly similar, even though they were all of different ages, gender, background and culture. They all stated how they felt really sorry for Jonny, something I initially wanted the video to make people react like. Also, people said how it encourages them to get in a relationship due to all the good times we see the couple have together in the video.

By showing the final video to a varied range of ages; year 8,9,10,11 and 13, it allowed me to see what the different age groups of people thought about it. I

found from this that younger boys aged around 13/14 didn’t enjoy the video as it wasbased on a topic that didn’t interest

them (love and romance). However, boys aged 17/18 reacted differently, they were able

to relate to the relationship in the video, they felt sorry for Jonny and were encouraged to reflect on their personalexperiences of different relationships

that they may have been in.

Cover Changes Changes…INITIAL IDEAS FINAL COVERPLANS

Here are the stages of creating my digipak front cover. Gaining audience feedback was extremely useful, it helped me to decide on the choice of my album cover image. I created four initial image ideas for the cover, as you can see above. I got feedback on the positives and negatives about each of the images. The feedback I got was very useful and it helped me to decide on features that I liked and features that I didn’t. I then came up with a whole new idea on the right. From this, I feel that my chosen image is a lot more appealing for it’s attended audience. I tried experimenting the image in many different ways, again gaining feedback about which edit people preferred. It is important that I used a strong, well shot image and from gaining lots of feedback, I have been able to develop my ideas well. I think my image is now more successful and suitable for the genre, something that gaining audience feedback has helped me to achieve.

Digipak Changes…

BEFORE

AFTER

Above are the stages of my digipak. I have clearly circled the features that I changed. I showed my first draft to my peers as well as my friends, they are all aged between 17-18 and therefore fall within our target audience. From this, I was able to learn about what others thought about it and whether they believed it was successful or not. Someone noticed that the guitar had a label on the back of it, therefore it is promoting the guitar too and showed that it was a distraction. I also changed the font of the artists note. People felt that it was fairly hard to read and some of the letters could easily be read incorrectly. I changed it to a more clear, easy to read font in order to make it more appealing for the audience to read. Finally, I added a barcode, this is a common feature of digipaks that I had missed out.

PLAN

Album Poster Changes…

BEFORE AFTER

Here are the plan, and before and after copies of my album poster. Again, I have clearly circled the feature that I changed after gaining feedback from my peers. From talking to my target audience, I learnt that it is quite common to have star rating on magazine posters. I felt that this would benefit my poster and therefore as you can see, I have added a NME rating below the artists name. Another change I made was the size of ‘Like We Used To’, I made it slightly smaller so that it is the same size on each of my products. I learnt from this about the importance of consistency and importance of clearly linking products.

PLAN

Tour Poster Changes…

BEFORE AFTERAbove are the plan, and before and after copies of my tour poster, with the changes that I made circled in red. I showed my poster to peers in order to see whether they feel it would be successful or not. The first change I made was making the album cover slightly bigger, this makes it stand out more and also makes it link more to the album poster. It is important that there is a sense of cohesion between my products, so this is one way to achieve this. Also, I decided to add Jono’s website address, I learnt about the importance of cross media promotion and how including the website address in each of my products could potentially help to increase Jono’s fan base. Finally, someone found part of the text hard to read due to the dark background. I decided to lighten the background slightly to make it clearer to read. This is important as if people can’t actually read the poster, then it will become unsuccessful and won’t be helping to achieve its purpose well.

PLAN