Evaluation Q3.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
ROUGH CUT COMMENTARY:

I found that the feedback I received from the rough cut was definitely the most useful out of all of the feedback I have collected in this process. I have created this commentary evaluating how I learnt and developed my media product from getting this audience feedback:

Track Listing Feedback:
After choosing what song I was going to do to carry out this project, I had to collect some audience feedback on their thoughts were on the track and what they would expect it to be like if used in a music video. I done this firstly by asking numerous people the following questions to get a feel for what their thoughts were on the genre of the song:

1. What is your favourite genre of music?

2. What do you think 'indie' people dress like?

3. What would you expect to see in an 'indie' music video?

4. Would you watch a music video which was just a band playing the song?

MAIN LOCATION

I did find this feedback useful to an extent but the most consistent bit of feedback was what the audience expected to see in a indie music video and what the characters should look like. In general, the responses that I got from the audience was that they think that the characters should be wearing 'hipster' styled clothing  which consisted of jeans, t shirts  beanie hats etc. This was useful for me when it came to production because this is an easy look to replicate and I found it easy to come up with the costumes that they were going to wear because my actors dressed liked that on a daily basis anyway. When it came to looking at how a indie music video would look they all seemed to have the same idea which was a simple location with instruments. There are many examples of places in my music video where I applied this audience feedback to my final product but the most obvious is the main location and props. The picture above shows the main location of the video and I think that this was mainly down to my audience feedback because I was originally planning to film my footage in a different location. I decided to change because I didn't think that the lighting was right in the first location and also it was quite busy and filled with lots of equipment  I think that this location was the best, most conventional choice. The costumes are also another obvious example of how I acted upon this audience research because the band is dressed in simple everyday clothes such as jeans and t shirts  However, there was a part of my feedback which I did not act upon. This was when some people suggested that there should be loads of instruments. I didn't act upon this because I found that using less instruments made the location more interesting because it made it look like it was an everyday band practice for the group. I do think that collecting this feedback was necessary for the whole production of my media product mainly because it was important for me to represent the indie genre in the right way because they have quite a strong fan base and nowadays there are a lot of 'hipster' styles about which receive a lot of negative feedback on how they represent themselves.

After collecting this feedback, I then went onto asking another group of people different questions, but this time they were about the actual song. These questions were:

1. Did you like the track?
2. What type of person would like this track?
3. Which age range would you typically associate with this song?
4. How would you picture the band/lead?
5. What sort of music video would you expect to accompany this track?
6. If performance, where and what type?
7. If narrative, what sort?

This feedback was probably the most useful out of the two. The most consistent thing that came up was that they thought that the song was happy and was aimed at teenagers and they all seemed to like the track in general. This was positive feedback because they were the aged target audience I was aiming for and they all seemed to enjoy it, even if they weren't huge indie music fans they enjoyed the feel good tempo to the song. One piece of feedback which I did not act upon from this feedback was that someone said that the song reminded them of a music video at a beach; I did not act upon this because I didn't think that a beach would be a realistic location for me to use although it would have been a good place that would have went well with the song. This feedback was very useful for me because I was able to see that the ideas that I had for my music video was basically the same as the audience I would be aiming my product at. This is beneficial because I know that I will be doing the right thing and by adding in extra little ideas it would make it more interesting (e.g. not just purely basing my video on performance but putting in the cutaway sections).

Digipak/Magazine Advert Feedback:
During the process of making my digipak and magazine advert for the promotion of my 'band' and their music video, I collected a small amount of feedback for the digipak to help me through this process. The feedback that I got was from both male and females aged 16-18 which is some of my target audience. This feedback was not as elaborate as the rest but I still found it substantially useful and significant. The most consistent criticism that kept coming up was that the section where the CD would go was too bright and the pattern was over powering to the rest of the images and colours. This is the first thing that I acted upon and I changed to opacity and brightness of the pattern to make it blend it more with the rest of the digipak. Straight away this seemed to work really well and then the digipak seemed to look a lot better. Because the majority of this feedback was the same, there wasn't really any that I didn't act upon apart from when one person said that the drawing were a bit too scruffy but. I didn't act upon this because that is how I wanted them too look in order for my products to fit in. Although I did not collect physical feedback for the magazine advert, during the process I did ask a couple of people what could be done to make it look better. The most said thing was that I should us the text that is on the back of the digipak to write the information for the magazine advert rather than just using the same text as the name of the band and the name of the album. It was useful for me to collect this feedback although I think that I could have managed to do the digipak and magazine advert without it because I wanted it to all be quite plain. However, I do think that the criticism about the CD was very useful.