What have I learned from my Audience Feedback?
After completing my final products, I wanted to get an understanding of how people felt about them and what I could've done to improve them. To do this I asked a group of my class mates to fill out a questionnaire based on my final products. Here are the results.
My Focus Group
The focus group of my questionnaire is the same as the focus group for my final products. It was a group of young students in my media class. This makes it much easier for me to gather my feedback as I know the students personally and I see them daily.
What did they like most?
In the feedback that I received from my class mates. Some of the things that they said was really impressive was the editing and the use of Indie Folk conventions. Our music video features a few different conventions that are usually seen in the Indie Folk genre. For example, the locations that we used were very stereotypical locations for a Indie Folk music video. We filmed half of our music video on a beach the other half in a woodland area. By choosing to film here, we thought that we were portraying the two moods that feature in our music video. A beach is often seen as being a happy and open place. Whereas a forest is seen as being a secluded and sad area. One comment in our the feedback that I received said "the choice of location for shooting was perfect, it really suites the Indie Folk genre." Our music video also featured a mixture of a narrative and a performance. By researching the Indie Folk genre, I noticed that this is a very common feature, so as a group we decided to implement it into our video.
As I have already mentioned, another feature that our target audience enjoyed was the editing our music video. One student said "the way the different shots change to match the beat really made the video much better to watch." We decided to implement this idea to our music video as it something that is very common in the Indie Folk genre. The quick shots are often used to keep up with the fast paced music. If the shots in the music video were slow, it would not match the music.
What did they not like?
To try and find ways to improve our video, we needed to ask the target audience what they did not like about our video. There were two things in our music video that the target audience thought could be improved. These were the choice of costume and the lip syncing. In some of our shots, the lip syncing was not in time with the the music. This was down to personal errors on the day of filming. However, to fix this error we would've had to go back to our location of filming, which we could not do.
Another feature of our music video that our target audience said needed improving was our costumes. One comment that I saw in our feedback said that "our characters could've had more accessories that are usually seen in the Indie Folk genre, like hats or trouser braces.". I do agree with this statement as these would have helped make our characters look better. However, I do feel that we done a good job with the costumes. The clothing used and the colour of it really matched the Indie Folk conventions.
What have I learned from this feedback?
The feedback that i received help me realise a lot of things. One of these things was to always listen to your audience. The audience of a product play a huge part in how successful a piece of media is. They're the ones who purchase, view and share different pieces of media. Audience feedback is also very important to listen to as they may come up with a good idea that you may have not thought of. For example, our initial music video was only going to feature one location. However, the audience felt that our music video would be better if it featured more than one location, so we decided to listen to them.
I also realised how important it is to follow and use the conventions usually seen in the genre of your choice. If you do not follow these conventions, the audience will not know what sort of message you are trying to send to them.