Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

In the media industry audience feedback is very important, as media encoders we assume what the decoders want and will take from our media products, this is why they require audience feedback to reiterate their thoughts and inputs into the products before they are brought onto the market to make sure they are providing the decoder with what they want.

I had a two staged approach to my audience feedback; first, screening rushes and initial editing and secondly screening my final product. Before I changed my idea and song choice I had some early filming of my first idea, which was to the Fray’s ‘Enough for now’ song, I showed this footage to the students in my media classed and then asked what they thought about it. All of my classmates took the aberrant reading from my footage, they found it was too complex and they just couldn’t understand it, this is when I changed my idea completely and realised even though I understand what is happening in my music video, the decoders may not. After changing my idea and song to ‘Hot Air Balloon’ by Owl City I began my filming and then again showed my classmates the early footage I had taken, I got a much better reaction than my previous work and found most of my classmates took the dominant reading, with the rest taking the negotiated meaning so I knew I had to change this through the use of editing to create better syntagmatic connotations. They gave feedback on what could improve my video, for example they found some of the footage was too dark and slightly shaky, so I knew that I would have to re-shoot some scenes. They also said they liked the use of visually showing some of the lyrics using building blocks and etch-e-sketch’s so I added more of this to please my target audience.

After starting my editing I showed my focus group again to see what they thought when my filming was all being put together. I got really positive feedback and found that all my classmates took the dominant reading. They found the mise-en-scene really effective, however the majority of my focus group wanted to see shorter clips in the editing. I then went back to my editing and used shorter clips to make the editing seem more professional and to give a fast-cut editing sequence to provide the decoder with more of a visual spectacle. I showed my classmates my film in progress after doing half of my editing to get a final view of my product, especially how my target audience would react to my film and what reading they would take from my text. Their comments were mainly positive, everyone in my focus group took the dominant reading, which means that my target audience all understand and liked my product. A few of the people in my focus group wanted to see more of the lyrics being spelt out throughout the song, so this influenced my production as I had to do a tiny bit more filming to achieve this, but overall they liked the editing and thought the mise-en-scene worked well in creating the childlike paradigm I was aiming for. The camera steadiness and dark shots were also replaced which my focus group said had made the video look much more professional. I found this initial audience feedback really useful to my product as I could get an outsiders view on my work and gave me pointers on how I could improve it.

The second stage of my audience feedback was to screen my finish media video to a new focus group. This group were 7 females and 3 males all who fell into my target audience age and ethnic bracket to make sure I was getting feedback from people who would be my target audience. I did this to see if there was a difference in viewing between my target audience and people out of my original focus group, to see if it appeals more to my preferred audience. After showing them my completed music video I asked them to carry out a questionnaire I designed. I created the questionnaire to find correlations between social stratification and reaction to the video. A few of the questions were designed in way to attempt to operationalise the Encoder/Decoder model. (see Research Section) This helped me to realise which reading my audience took from my final product, all of my focus group took the dominant reading. I am really happy with this as people bring to media texts many different experiences and sometimes react in unpredictable ways so I’m glad that my target audience all took the dominant reading.

However seeing as my focus group watched the video all together and not in their usual setting of being at home where from my questionnaire I found that’s where my target audience mainly watch music videos this could have an effect on my results. This is explained in the uses and gratifications theory that explains that the context of watching a screening in those conditions and then having to answer a questionnaire may have changed the typical gratification a person might have got from watching the video in another context and not have the pressure of having to answer a questionnaire. I also asked this same focus group to answer another questionnaire on my ancillary texts, I wanted to see their opinions on how well my 3 media texts worked together and what they found successful. All of the focus group took the dominant reading for my 3 media texts.

Carrying out audience feedback has helped me see problems with my work that because I’m constantly looking at it I become unaware of. It has also helped me to get feedback on what my target audience want from a music video, so helped me try and incorporate these elements into my work to aim my media products at them.