What have you learned from your audience feedback?Felan Quirke

Initial Research+Questionnaire

When carrying out our initial research, Emma and I wanted to distinguish what people looked for in documentaries. So we created a questionnaire which provided questions for people within our class to answer, we handed the questionnaire to 10 people to gain more objective and reliable results. The people within our class consisted of males and females so this meant our results weren’t bias and we gained more broad range of opinions from a variety of people. Our first question was what genre of documentary do you prefer and nearly half of the people we asked said, human behaviour. After asking them why they claimed that, “It is more immersive because you gain a sense of relatability.” This tied in well when coincided with our subject focus; highlighting the abuse elderly people face within care homes. The genre itself would need to evoke empathy among our audience and because it is a human based genre, we had to generate a tone of intimacy and make it personal, which aided our intent.Emma and I wanted to find out what style people enjoyed watching before we began anything else so audience feedback was essential here as it acted as a starting point for our documentary. Not only the documentary but for the entire Advanced Portfolio; my advert and DPS. Because it was going to be a human Behaviour documentary this meant that the DPS and Advert had to visually display a connection to a person and topic.

Ancillary task peer feedback

I created many drafts of my ancillary tasks in order to construct the most effective media product, I created so many drafts on account of my peer/audience feedback being implemented into the creation process. I was within my media class when working on my ancillary tasks and this allowed me to ask my peers for feedback. We each lay images of our products throughout the room and we all walked around and left improvement comments and what went well comments on sticky notes. This allowed me a broader range of opinions and influenced my creativity, it also allowed me to spot mistakes that I myself couldn’t see.

Consequently, peer feedback was essential when creating my ancillary tasks as it allowed me to create a more innovative product as I had many different ideas from people in my class.

After asking 19 people what device they like to see in documentaries half of them said a voiceover was the most important. When asked why they replied, “They explain what’s going on which makes the documentary easier to watch.” This decided that my documentary would be informative and adopt an expository styling that would include a voiceover to coincide with the narrative. Again, peer feedback aided my decision making process and helped me to establish what devices were most prevalent.

Here you can see an early draft of my advertisement, after showing it to my class I received feedback which said that I needed to implement a darker colour scheme and after doing this it made me realise that it would continue the ongoing ominous theme. So peer feedback allowed me to see my errors and develop upon them.

This is an early draft of my DPS, initially I didn’t intend to include text in the form of an article or interview I was just going to keep it simple, to evoke a minimalistic style. However, after considering my audience I thought it would be better to include an informative aspect to appeal to my specific audience, which I discovered would be people aged between 20-40 with the psychographic group of aspirers. This is because my documentary intention is top inspire change and balance within society. I discovered my audience because I had given my questionnaires to people aged from 16-18 which wasn't taking into account the older generation, when asked if they liked informative elements to documentaries and DPS’s they said no. So I realised that the older generation would probably prefer reading into the media product more than the younger people. So in the end I decided to include text.

Overall

Feedback from my ancillary tasks was extremely helpful as the advice allowed me to make useful alterations to my work which resulted In the final product. I discovered that all three aspects of the coursework needed to work in tandem in order to promote the media products correctly.

Ultimately thought, feedback from my actual documentary was most effective because when I received that I could edit my ancillary tasks accordingly i.e.. Incorporate a ominous colour scheme, include informative aspects for my older audience. I also learnt that because I followed Channel 4 for my institution inspiration I wanted to use the expository styling because Channel 4 are so popular with their aspiring audience. The voiceover aspect of this style was also recommended by the feedback I was given as it would make the documentary easily perceived.