Q3-What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The first stage of my research involved me conducting a questionnaire to send out to my target audience. Basically from this me and my partner wanted to gather some reliable and valid data which we could transfer into a graph format. This was an extremely important part of the coursework because it gave us an insight into our target audiences preferences, which would then allow us to create a music video that would be fully appreciated.

The questionnaire that we produced included the following questions, and generated this feedback:

1) Gender?
Male Female


70% of the people we asked were male and 30% of the people we asked were female.






2)Age?

40% were aged 17-25 and the other 60% were 8-16

0-7 8-16 17-25 25+

out of the people we asked, all of them were either 16 or 17, so they fitted in two specific boxes. 40% were aged 17-25 and the other 60% were aged 8-16


















3)How many music videos do you watch per week?
0 1-3 4-7 8-11 11+

60% of our audience (which is majority) said that they say 4-7 music videos a week

the other 40% said differently.
20% said that they watch 1-3 music videos 
20% said that they saw 8-11 










4)What is your favourite genre? 
RNB RAP DRUM n BASS INDIE
DUBSTEP ROCK HEAVY METAL OPERA SOUL

This was perhaps the most important question on the questionnaire because here we really got to find out our target audiences opinion and what kind of music they liked. This is where we had the biggest variety of answers.
The option that was the most popular was ROCK, we asked 10 people and out of them, 8 people ticked rock as one of their favourite music genre.
Second most popular option was INDIE, which was ticked by 7 people.
6 people ticked DUBSTEP as one of their favourite types of music.
RAP & DRUM'n'BASE were only ticked by 5 people.
RNB& SOUL wereonly ticked by 3 people.
The least popular option was HEAVY METAL and OPERA , which only one person ticked.




5)What would you expect to find in a music video?
dancing shots of the performer(s) close ups of actors cutaways
establishing shots of locations titles


This question focussed more on the technical part of the music video as opposed to the part which a non-media-student takes notice of.
The most popular options turned out to be 'SHOTS OF THE PERFORMER', 'CUTAWAYS' and 'CLOSE UPS OF ACTORS'. After getting this feedback me and my partner decided to incorporate all 3 shot-types into our music video.
'DANCING' was not seen by any of our target audience as being vital in a music video, and not something that they would necessarily expect to see either. For this reason amongst others, we decided not to include any form of choreography in our media piece.
4 people out of 10 said that they thought TITLES were important in a music video and only 2 people said that ESTABLISHING SHOTS OF LOCATIONS were important in a music video. 



6)How important in your opinion is that the narrative of the music video links to the song lyrics?
0..1..2..3..4..5..6..7..8..9..10

In this question no one picked lower than 6.

10% picked 6, 30% picked 7, 40% picked 8 and 20% picked 10

1 people picked 6
3 people picked 7
4 people picked 8
2 people picked 10 











For the second step of our research, we decided to show our music video to our peers in the media class. This gave us both positive and negative feedback. The positive feedback that was generated covered all aspects of media, from visual effects to the acting. In terms of the acting, my media teacher was particularly impressed with the realism of the acting and the feeling shown by the actor. Some people in the class disagreed and said that the actor did not show feeling, but these were people with no acting experience who didn't understand that over-emotion in a music video can make it look cheap and fake. Another topic of positve discussion was the editing side of the piece. One specific part that my peers enjoyed was the spin by the main actor, which cut to 3 different locations. This was something that i did personally, so to get recognition for this was very pleasing.
Once my video was complete, I was able to undergo the third step which was to upload the video to YouTube for the public to see. I also linked it to social networking sites such as twitter and Facebook so my online friends could comment on it. On YouTube I only got two comments but on Facebook & twitter I got a lot of feedback.
I also got a lot of text messages and blackberry messenger messages about my video.

I put my video onto Facebook, and here 15 people liked my video, consisting of 12 girls and 3 boys. The overhaul of female viewers in relation to male viewers was something that we expected bearing in mind the genre and origional artist.

List of comments i received about my video

All of the user comments generated were positive and because of this we were extremely happy about our video. However, we did get questions about the girl in the towel, lots of people were confused as to why our female actor was in a towel, but then after iweexplained to them that she was meant to be seductive, they then understood and thought the idea was good.

This is a private inbox my partner got from one of her friends.

This is another email that she received from another friend of hers.

This is when i told more people to comment on my video. I got extra comments and % extra likes, all from girls.

If I had the oppertunity to re-do my A2 media coursework I think the main thing that i would improve would be the camera handling skills of the person doing the filming. As pointed out in some of out viewer feedback, some of the shots aren't steady and i think that this has a negative effect on the feeling of those particular scenes. Perhaps also, there is a case that in some scenes there is not much feeling shown by the actor, so this is another thing that we could have discussed and improved. However, overall i have enjoyed the coursework and it has been a thouroughly positive experience.
                                      

Q2-How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

When constructing our ancillary tasks, the main target that we set for ourselves was to fully incorporate the imagery and feeling created by the main task. The music video generated feelings of lonliness and isolation from the main characters point of view, and this cause the audience to empathise with him and feel sorry for him. In my opinion, these themes were the bedrock of our coursework and this is why we wanted them to feature in our ancillary tasks. However, the story of the song "Should've Kissed You" doesnt really have much to it - a boy that is upset with himself after not kissing the girl and therefore in his mind he ruined his chances - and for this reason we thought that too much information in the magazine advert or CD cover would in a sense give it away. After discussing this with my partner, we decided that we would limit the amount of information the consumer gets through the ancillary tasks.

It is evidenthere that some of the key elements of our main task are not included in either of our ancillary tasks, perhaps most impotantly the girl. We didnt want to add the girl to either because we wanted to give the audience the feeling of his lonliness and isolation in himself, but also we wanted to keep them guessing as to the reason for these emotions.

The shot used for the magazine poster and CD cover is one that reoccurs in the music video itself - a mid shot of the male character walking by himself, showing the emptiness of his surroundings.

It is evident from this still image of a scene within the piece the similarities in posture and expression between the main piece and ancillary tasks. The only other difference is that we edited our poster and CD cover in a black and white colour scheme. We decided to do this to add the the questions going through the audiences mind as to what the problem is, but also to enhance that dull feeling of sadness that the character is experiencing.