Evaluation Q3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

During the making of my music video and during the ancillary tasks overall we needed to get audience feedback, the thoughts from our target audiences as well as people who are not involved in that category.
To begin with, right at the beginning of our coursework we constructed interviews with people who would fit into the category of our target audience as well as people who were not in this category. We asked questions to our audience about the kind of music video they would like to see, what it would involve, what sort of characters they like, we showed them some examples of the kind of themes we were focusing on for our music video and they had the option to choose which sort of direction they would like us to head in with our video. The people we interviewed were 3 people from the 17 - 18 age group and the other group of three males and two females was in the age range of 14 - 15, all there occupations were students. The questions asked were :-

What are your views on alternative rock music?
We then showed them 3 music videos..
- Narrative - Coldplay 'The Scientist'
- Performance - Foo Fighter 'The Pretender'
- Concept based - Kings Of Leon - Radioactive
And which one they preferred...
Our final question was what they thought to our song choice of Imagine Dragons 'On Top Of The World'...



The feedback we got back from this was generally good and positive, in general the attitude towards Alternative Rock music was quite underestimated as most of the students we asked didn't really listen to much of it, or would choose not to if they had the option. The preferred video out of the three by vast majority was Foo Fighters 'The Pretender' - they preferred this because it was more outgoing and intimate with the song and they all seemed to like the song. In terms of our Imagine Dragons song which we were using for our music video they all identified that it was a very uplifting and happy song, some people said they would listen to that song out of choice (mainly females) and some said that they probably wouldn't listen to that song out of choice! In terms of helping us with our music video etc. we did take these comments and opinions on board, however, we had an alternative interview/group discussion with our media class at the time and they disagreed, they predominately enjoy alternative rock music as well and differed in there answers to our focus group. In appreciation to this me and my group decided to go with what we felt was best, taking on board what feedback everyone had given us overall.

For our digipak and advert ideas, we did not produce a focus group video interviewing individuals to find out what progress we needed to make, instead, we had a media group discussion presenting our ideas and thoughts and welcomed any feedback and choices that anyone was willing to give. For our digipak, we presented two front cover ideas, a back page idea and any other snippets of ideas we had.


The first idea was similar to the idea we did choose for our digipak. We used the same symbol and font for the artist name, however we used a different background in this idea, we also used different pictures for each triangle outline in the symbol. The class did like this rendition of our first draft, this was the preferred idea for our front cover overall. It was described by some as 'illusional' which is exactly the kind of feel and theme we were looking for as this is extremely common in the alternative rock genre.

This originally was our idea for our back cover to the digipak, however, the class did like this idea they just thought it would look better maybe as an additional picture inside instead of on the back. This shot is from the music video where the cast are running up the hill, it is a very  happy and iconic shot hence why we used this as a draft to associate our music video with our digipak.







The next idea was again for the front of our digipak, the class did like this idea and in the end it was between this draft and the first front cover draft with the triangle on that it was down to. Overall the majority of the class chose the first cover idea, a small minority chose this idea.

In terms of our advert feedback, we again did a class/group feedback session on what we thought of each others adverts and which one we preffered out of the optional drafts. After showing our drafts to the class with our three ideas, the class helped us choose the one that was best for our genre and what went well with the ideas from out digipak. Overall the group chose this draft as the best advert due to the look of it being the same as the digipak, also as the colour scheme is slightly different this challenges the brand identity of the front cover to the digipak. This formative feedback helped me and my group very much, not only were we very happy with our finishing piece but it meant that more than likely, our audience would like it too, as the feed back given to us was from the age range of 17 - 18 which is our perfect target audience for demographics and for this general genre of music.

 

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After finalising our video, the next stage was to get feedback on its entirety from the general public, we each did this individually by posting our video on social networking sites, as one of the largest and most popular networks is Facebook, we each made a post on this promoting our video and asking for feedback and comments. As well as this the video is already on YouTube this enabled any viewers and YouTube channels to comment on our video, this is another chance to have feedback on what went well for us and audiences didn't like as much.






































Not only did we use social networking sites to get our feedback, we also sent an email to staff to ask for their views and opinions on our video as well as everyone else's in the class, one teacher got back to us with constructive criticism as well as good points about the music video, other teachers just responded with that they like the videos etc. This teacher responded to our video with 'story seemed initially random, but then nice sense of intrigue built up with wanting to see where everyone was going, effects treatments kept it interesting.' This feedback was great for an understanding of what audiences think to our video, although this teacher does not fall in to our focus group/target audience her feedback was very welcoming and great to here, the confusion that she felt which she explained in her feedback is exactly the kind of feel we were trying to get as for this type of genre and with the reputation of Imagine Dragons former music videos, illusional and intriguing is the aim we were looking for.

This was our feedback....





In terms of what aspects of our products went down best with our audiences, the happy, uplifting feel of the video definitely was one of the most popular aspects, also the fact all the characters were different and individual, this made them easier for audiences to relate to. The intrigue of finding out where all the characters were going was also another aspect which audiences enjoyed watching. For the digipak the audience liked the symbolism for the brand identity using the triangle, also the illusional feel to the digipak and ofcourse the advert was liked by audiences.
In terms of what the audience didn't like so much, the confusion of where the characters were all going, and what was on Kain's phone in the video that made them all suddenly leave, that confused our audience according to our feedback, during feedback as well, our audience said they didn't like how long the curtain dance scene was, and that there wasn't long enough time to notice the fact the character had changed clothes.
Putting all this feedback together, if we were to do our music video again we would change the above aspects to please our audience, but to please ourselves, we would make our video more illusional...Imagine Dragons music videos are well known for being bizarre and different to other music videos and especially to other genres. For this we would make our music video a little bit less narrative and happy and more dark and bizarre.