3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is important because the product is being made for an audience and the product can be improved more effectively through the audience’s feedback.

The ultimate focus of developing the media product was to sell and promote our artist to our audience, and we found out how to do this through our audience’s feedback by improving it according to their perspective and this would mean that they would help to secure the success of the product. We needed to make sure that we was getting appropriate audience feedback at the right time, therefore we used selective audiences at different stages. To begin with we explored our song choices and selected a few, we then thought of ideas of music videos for it and returned to our group with our favourite song choice. After having selected song choices we chose to pitch our ideas to a class of media students and a teacher, which is having a selective audience.

We received feedback from our audience and this was good as they were in the same position as us so they were familiar with the task and had good understanding of it, therefore their feedback was effective to put forward towards our idea. They were able to understand limitation that we had as students and this gave us realistic feedback. From our feedback, we were told that we needed to make sure that we do include a friend’s scene, as it would show a backstory. Also they mentioned that the sketching idea was very creative and that we should extend it and use it as a theme as our initial idea was to use the sketch effect to introduce the girl.

Using our feedback, we moved onto construction of our first draft of the music video and print tasks. After completing our first draft, we took it to our target audience by presenting our product to a group of young people who were consumers of this genre and listened to music of this type. We asked them a set of questions and received many verbal feedbacks and took this into account to improve our product further. They were able to comment on the accuracy of our genre and the star construction of the artist.

From the feedback we received on our first draft there were a few changes that needed to be made, firstly we decided to introduce our artist and song at the very beginning of the music video as the audience mentioned that they wasn’t familiar with the artist name or the song looking at the video and would like to know who this song is by and what its called, therefore we thought that this was something we could include in our product. This was a feature that I wasn’t really familiar with and that as fans of the genre they were able to open my eyes to.

ROBBIE WILLIAMS - CANDY

Finally we gained feedback form our class teachers and the head of media. This was important as this is effectively a piece of coursework, which needs to meet the specification and assessment criteria, if it was a real music video, then we would have a slightly different focus. The teachers identified key technical and editing improvements that we could make, such as during a lip sync scene they thought the colour of the artist face did not look right as the lighting made the face look to bright and yellow, using our video editing software Final Cut Pro, we changed the brightness, saturation and contrast of the clips to make it seem more normal.

I feel that we successfully used audience feedback to help inspire us in the construction stages and to help us make relevant and necessary improvements. However looking back I feel that there were other opportunities where we could have gained some feedback, but we found the construction task so challenging and time consuming in itself that we didn’t really prioritise audience feedback as we maybe should have. In a real media production there would be more pressure to confirm to audience expectations. We mostly used our research to guide us and lead us as to if we had met these expectations; that and also our own expertise as music consumers of the relevant age group for target audience.