Advance Portfolio
A2 Media
Emilie Bowes-Read Media Studies
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
I conducted lots of audience feedback as I wanted to get a wide range of comments and reactions to look at and be able to write about.
First of all I showed my family our video and then recorded my brother Samuel aged 16 response. I thought it was really important to get his reaction as he falls into the age bracket of our target audience for the piece. I then uploaded the link onto Facebook as I knew this was one of the quickest ways to reach our target audience and get responses. Within minutes it had gained 50 likes and many positive comments such as "Impressed", "This is actually so good" and Oscar Gul making a reference to the song with the comment "Great choice of song". This comment especially was great to see as we had conducted lots of audience research in advance to try and choose a song that would be really popular with the target audience. I also uploaded the video onto YouTube where it has reached over 400 views. It is great to be able to use these free social media platforms to get our product out there as it gives us lots of different audience feedback.
Here is the recording of my brother Samuel's feedback to our video (aged 16)
Some of the points that Samuel raised in this interview I found really intriguing. One example of this was a comment he made about the establishing shot of the house that we'd used. He felt this gave our piece an element of supernatural and spirituality. This is a very interesting point to analyse as the lyrics of the song are to do with religion (which Samuel was not aware of) and so the fact we have managed to reflect this through our piece is, in my opinion, a great achievement.
I also sent out a link to some of my friends and our video was shown at another school (although we didn't give them permission to do this) however we received great feedback from this. Alex Smith (17) commented "that video was sick, it had a really trippy and edgy feel to it and the editing skills looked really professional", Jamie Warmington (17) said "I didn't realise it was a video made by students until I realised I recognised one of the actors in the piece it looked so professional". I also sent a copy to the actors within the piece to see their reaction. Jesse Smit the main actor (18) said "That actually looks so sick, you guys have edited it so well, I have no experience of media studies as a course but that looks like quality."
We also conducted audience research within our media class. This consists of us 3 girls and 13 boys so it meant we had viewpoints from both genders. Below is a table of some of the comments that were made and how we could have improved our product.
Overall I am very happy with the feedback that my group received as it was very positive and full of high praise. The audience feedback was very useful as it highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of our music video and allowed us to consider what we would change if we had the chance.
The general feedback was that the use of filters, unusual editing effects and unique idea of the face makeup made our video stand out and give off a 'wow effect' after viewing it. The choice of our locations was also very popular as the audience said they could relate to the use of London as a location as they had been there before and it is such an iconic place. They loved the abandoned house as they felt it was very intriguing and I have since been contacted by many younger media students about this location.
There were only a few slight improvements that the audience felt we could make such as changing the lip syncing in 1 shot and the colour scheme used in the strobe lighting shots in order to make the video colour scheme more consistent.
Overall I feel that our music video was very successful and proved to be a big hit with the target audience who responded in a very positive manner to the product that we presented to them.