Evaluation Question 3 (Anderson)

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

My audience feedback linked towards genre?

During the making of my media products, the repetitive use of audience feedback helped make both large and small changes to our products and in the end helped improve our final products. Audience feedback was to the making of our magazine advert digipak and music video and without these constructive criticisms our products would have looked quite different to what it is now.

Song choice and genre?

'Survey Monkey' is a digital platform that allows everyone like me to create survey online for anyone to partake in. The use of surveys helped engage different audiences who varied in hobbies, music taste, and age. We made the questions simple and straight to the point to make our decisions much easier to what our product should include. Some examples of the questions we used are: what genres do you listen to, what you would expect to see in a Hip-Hop music video, what is your age and what are convention of rap genre to you. From our audience feedback we came to the conclusion to base our choice in genre to hip hop and the demand and interest towards this was the most popular out of the other music genres.

Again with the help of audience feedback, other questions that we asked linked towards the hip hop genre gave us the impression that we should use props such as money and other factors like alcohol and girls in order conform the stereotype of rap music videos. For this reason we implemented these ideas in order to make our music video more appealing to our target audience as it meets the demand and interest of our consumers.

Why was this audience feedback important and how did the use of audience feedback beneficial in structuring our music video?

Overall our audience feedback helped to narrow what genre to pick, possible locations that would suit this genre and also the age of our target audience. This information was important in terms of structuring a music video that most of our target audience can enjoy and relate to. The use of the questionnaire gave us an insight towards a suitable target market towards the hip hop genre which is ages mainly between 16-24 yrs old. As a group we were able to know what conventions are related to the hip hop genre in terms of mise en scene and camera shots, angles and movement, sound and editing. In terms of mise en scene we knew what props, costumes and lighting would suit best in terms of filming what camera angles would be most suited for the music video. For sound we knew it had to be a hip-hop song which leads us to the choice of the (TGIF by Chris Yonge). Finally for editing we knew that the music video should consist of many cuts to make it look quicker and upbeat just like the song and also visual transitions. All of these helped us to create a much more realistic hip-hop music video. The use of audience feedback also leads us to the connotations within hip hop which resulted in us having enough information and ideas to be to create a plan and storyboard for our music video.

Feedback on our song choice:

As a group we had many ideas of possible songs we could use for our music video. For this reason we let other people listen and give feedback of what song may suit best and why. To make this fair we chose people who have different tastes in music and this mean we can have feedback of both people how enjoy the hip hop genre and from those who don’t.

From this we were able to conclude how different audiences from outside our school could react. Some mentioned how the use of language was too explicit and that we should consider possibly making a clean version which is something we did create for our music video. This was a key point and made us think more about marketing as keeping a song PG makes it more appealing to audiences that our outside our target audiences. This is mainly to those much younger from ages 16 and under. When creating a clean version of our song, we aimed not to just cut the parts off where there is swearing as this will lower the quality of the song. I tried to imitate what a clean version of a song would sound like if it was on the radio and tried implementing this to our song. I achieved this by lowering the volume slightly where there was swearing and overlaying it with a blur sound effect. By doing so not only could we reach a much broader target audience but also make the quality of the song is not ruined.

Our audience feedback on our choice of song helped us to decide that we should use the lyrics of the song to create a narrative to tell a story by linking it towards the lyrics of the song. This mainly consisted of going out and partying just like every average person within our target audience. We were able to achieve this by having the music video ordered into sections each with different locations. Examples would be how we went from a barber scene where our main character was getting ready to our next shot which was our party scene.  From our audience feedback we also got told how to be able to represent a party scene the use of alcohol as a prop would be effective in portraying the stereotype as it is something you associate with partying. This idea was filmed however we did not show anyone drinking to keep our wide target audience.

Costume and audience feedback:

Here we got feedback with the use of a printed questionnaire. We used this an we can easily have members of our class to give us their opinions everyone fits into the age range of our target audience. This mainly consisted of ages 17 to 18. From these questions we were able to plan ahead to one of the technical codes (mise en scene) to focus on how we can use costume to portray the hip hop genre.

Audience feedback on rough cut:

The reason behind getting feedback during different phases of our editing process was to understand what looked good to others. By doing this it made it easier to make minor changes throughout instead of major changes towards the end. We also decided to get some audience feedback from the older ages of our target audience to have opinions ad feedback from two different age groups

Overall both audience feedback commented on the effective use of mise en scene as our main character who acted as the artist looked realistic in being a rapper. They mentioned also how the lip syncs throughout was done well however there was one part of the song where the lip sync was slightly out of time. This was something I did not realise during the editing process therefore this audience feedback was useful to help make those minor changes. The use of match on action was said to make the music video realistic when changing from one scene to another however someone commented about how some scenes transition to other scenes that have too much different in lighting. From this I decided to use colour correction and to adjust the brightness and contrast to make it look that the lighting is similar to most clips. Our audience also liked the choice of location as it followed the convention of a jip-hop music video due to it lively. On the other hand our audience wanted to see more angles such as a close up of the artist himself.

Why audience feedback was important in this stage?

From the audience feedback we received we focused only about what they didn’t like to be able to continue improving our music video. This mainly was to do with the realism of making it look like a music video. This was to do with the lip sync at one stage of the music video which didn't work well and also minor details such as lighting details. This feedback enabled us to learn from the mistakes which we were not able to point out. After this we went back to our edit and began to fix these issues.

Final cut audience feedback:

We also decided to show our final version of our music video to our whole class to see whether they believe that our  music video portrayed the convention of rap genre. From our audience response many liked the use of smooth transitioned to make the music video look more continuous when changing from one location to another. Many people also thought that the use of locations suited the conventions of  the hip-hop genre and how each location suited the next to be able to show a narrative. They also enjoyed how we linked the lyrics of the song to the locations in the music video. Many also thought that the use of colours of both our locations and titles and also the colour correction used. Many said that the use of colour correction made the video look the shots look less dull and more professional. 

Overall what we learnt form audience feedback:

From the constant use of audience feedback I have learnt that is acts as a vital tool be able to point our mistakes that perhaps you did not point out yourself. Because of this it enabled and guided me to be able to fix and create a much more professional looking music video. Not only this, it aided in the in decision making during preproduction which mainly included our storyboard and the choice of location and clothing. I have also noticed the impact of audience feedback helped result our music video to suit much more than our target market.

Audience feedback on our magazine advert and digipak:

Our audience feedback for both our magazine advert and digipak consisted of many positives and negatives which overall helped us make changes to achieve a much more realistic product.

Positives:

• Our audience mentioned how the images used relates to the genre of hip hop due to the use of urban clothing worn by the artist. 

• They also enjoyed the choice of image for our front cover and how all our images include synergy of the urban theme.

• The use of different font sizes made it clear to distinguish each title and how the use of font colour made it easy to know what was the song name and the artist himself. Not only this the font is clear and bold makes it eye catching for audiences like themselves 

• They thought that the concept of designing the digipak to be able to fit a booklet inside was a nice touch

• They also mentioned how both our magazine advert and digipak used synergistic elements such as location, use of font and colour

• Overall they said how our magazine advert and digipak does convey the conventions of real media products relating to these

Criticisms:

• Some people mentions that there was too much text and that we should make it more simplistic

• Others thought that the bar code looks different compared to other digipaks

• The rating shown made people believe it was a movie trailer however after mentioning that this was one of intentions of the magazine advert they thought that it was a nice touch

• Some made a good point how our main image for our magazine advert and digipak included the Simpson character behind our artist. They mentioned how many had more attention on Bart Simpson and believed the song to be related to him.

• However on a whole our audience believed that our magazine advert is effective in promoting our music video as it conveys many of the conventions of real media text magazine advert. They said that it looks realistic and is believable for being a poster.