What have you learned from your audience feedback?

           As previously mentioned, the target audience for my video is males ages 16-25, however there is also the secondary audience of females also aged 16-25. Feedback is a vital part of making any media product as it cannot be considered successful if it does not appeal to the intended audience. Hence, throughout all stages of making my video, digipack, and magazine advert, I asked people of both my primary and secondary audience to give me feedback on my ideas and work so far. I generated feedback through videoing audience member’s reactions after having watched my video, asking audience members to fill in feedback forms on my print work and ideas, conducting polls on my blog, counting votes on different versions of my video, hosting my video on Youtube and Vimeo, as well as posting it on the social networking site Facebook and blogging platform Tumblr. This allowed me to get different types of feedback: I had statistics as well as full comments.

I found that some feedback was more effective than others, for example I found it easier to make decisions on feedback if it could be presented in statistics as I could see which choice is generally preferred. Having said that, the more personal responses such as those I received on Facebook where useful for overall seeing how well my video was being recieved. For example, when deciding between filters, I conducted a vote amongst some audience members and chose the filter that got the most votes, but when I wanted to see what people thought of my drafts and finished products, text-based comments were far more useful. As well as asking people on the internet to give me feedback, I also asked family members and friends face-t0-face, as I knew that they were more likely to be honest with me than acquaintances I have on Facebook. Additionally all the people I had used in my video were keen to see it and I found their feedback especially useful as they already had an idea of how they thought it would look, and I wanted to see how my final product matched up with that idea.

When editing in After Effects, I often asked audience members to choose between different versions of my video. For example, I made several copies of the same clip and used the blemish removal technique for all but one of them, changing how drastic each one was. Then I showed the clips to my audience and asked them to vote on which they thought looked best. They all agreed that the clip without the noise reduction looked unprofessional, whilst the clip with the most noise reduction looked blurry. I did this for several different close-ups, leaving me with the noise reduction setting that was appropriate for each clip. Then I showed them various clips from both the colour and black-and-white narratives with different filters and one without a filter, and asked them to vote on which they preferred. Interestingly many of the audience members chose different filters for different clips, however I wanted to make sure that I used the same filter throughout the narrative as I did not want it to look disjointed, and it would also help differentiate between the two narratives, so I asked them again which they preferred overall. This was extremely helpful when it came to making these final decisions.

Another very helpful stage for feedback was when I was choosing which shots to discard from the colour narrative to be replaced with ones from the black-and-white narrative. When screening my first draft music video, I made a note of which shots people said they liked and which they didn’t like as much or understand, and I used this when editing my video in Adobe Premiere Pro. For example, I knew not to remove the shot of a blender as often people commented, unprompted, on how much they liked it, and people that had never seen the video before frequently laughed slightly at the reference to the lyrics made by the shot.