Question 3 - Draft

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Before I started thinking of a song I had to decide to who my target audience is with the resources I had available. This means that I had a 17 year old teenager as my actress/model, a green available to use and any other public locations. When putting all these resources together it was obvious that my target audience would be to teenagers from the ages 13 to a minimum of 24 because my model/actor was also within that age range. Furthermore the artist who sang the song originally, Selena Gomez also fits within the age range, as she is 22. I then decided to choose a song that would suit the age range and is quite popular. I also wanted to choose a song whereby my model/actress is comfortable with and with that thought in my mind she came to me with the song choice of ‘Come and Get It’ by Selena Gomez. This was very fortunate as she is within the age range and because she liked and felt comfortable with the song so will the majority of the target audience.

During the research and planning stage I realised the feedback is a crucial stage of any creative project. I recognised this while watching official music videos of popular artists and I sat their finding a few faults and issues or when something just didn’t look right. However that is classed as my own opinion. It became clearer when watching previous students music videos as they have gone through the same thing as I went through and either didn’t receive enough feedback or not qualitative feedback because I found plenty of issues which my peers also agreed with me. I wanted to make sure that I did not fall in the same trap. If they had got useful, qualitative feedback they could have improved a few of issues. Therefore feedback is an extremely important stage in the process.

The feedback I then received after completing the second draft of my music video was through surveys and focus group. I received feedback while I was creating my music video and this helped me think of questions for the survey. I created the survey on SurveyMonkey.com. I had used this website last year to create a survey for my AS Coursework so I was familiar with it. The whole purpose for the survey was to receive further feedback and how I could improve my music video. To create the questions I used the 9 types of questions idea which was having a question whereby the respondent would answer with a statement, a list, a yes/no, a agree/disagree, choosing options from a list that I would give them, a rank order, rating scale, a rating of how much you agree or disagree or a feeling about the particular topic, for example if it is boring or good. This helped me to get qualitative and quantitative data. I made sure I got the target audience to fill out my survey as it will help me improve the music video. I wanted to get those who do media to do my survey as well as non-media students because their feedback will be more informative as they will understand what software I have used and what I can do to make it better. I asked people to do my survey through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Whatsapp. So respondents varied from friends to random people. Some of these did include media students so results were quite critical which was good. I was quite happy with the results I received for my survey. I got 54 responses. Some were really helpful and made me think on how I can improve certain areas of my music video. Some people were really nice and gave me full marks and the best possible comment. On the other hand some people were plain rude and gave me the most impossible improvements to do at this stage of the process.

The questions I asked was about how professional my music video was on a scale of 1 to 10 which covers one of the 9 types of questions. The second question was about the costumes whether they fit with the song. The next question was about the locations and if they looked okay together in the music video as one is a field and another is green screen. Another question was how the flow was in my music video meaning did the music video go through smoothly or were there any glitches. Another question was about the editing and how ‘cool’ it looked. This was a key question for me as I did feel most improvements will be needed there. The last question was about improvements and what I need to do to improve it.  

For the professionalism of my music video question the average result was 7/10 where 10 is good and 1 is bad. I was quite happy with that result as I can always increase that to 8 at least with the improvements I do. For the costumes question the responses were quite mixed. Quite a few people questioned that why is the actress wearing a sari however my perception for this was that the song has an Indian introduction and to make it a bit original I added the sari element in. It was an advantage point that my model is also Asian so the sari suited her perfectly. Additionally I will be talking about the music video in my exam theoretically so I needed something to talk about and why my music video is different from current music videos especially the original music video of the song. With that reasoning I have decided to ignore that part of the feedback. Continuing to the next question about location. Again I had mixed responses on this. Some people didn’t notice anything about it; those who did notice felt they fit together nicely. However most people felt that the field footage looked out of place with the green screen footage. I put that as an option in the first place as a peer commented on that while I was editing the music video and I started to worry about that. Also I now feel that maybe people didn’t actually notice anything wrong about the locations until I mentioned it as an option nevertheless I cannot judge that. In terms of taking action about that feedback I will leave it just the way it is as 25/53 people said it looked fine. Majority of the people rated my flow as good and some said can be improved which I am working on.

Furthermore, the question about the editing was a multiple choice question with the choices really cool, looks good, too tacky, boring and too much going on. I also had a comment box which allows them to expand themselves further if they need to. The responses to my last question about improvements were somewhat all similar. One thing that at least 80% of the respondents said was the sound which I was also aware of. The volume of the sound kept changing from loud to quiet and was quite distracting. I didn’t know how to fix it the problem and therefore left it. I feel I should have mentioned it within the survey somehow and so I would have received better improvements. Other improvements that I received were to change location or get a better actress or change the song. These improvements I completely ignored, as they were next to impossible. The other useful improvements I received were to do with the effects. Quite a few people who were aged between 19-21 which suggested they were quite intellectual, said either to keep them consistent or some said to cut them down a bit, as they were too bright. Additionally some of them mentioned that the green screen could be a bit neater. These kinds of improvements I am able to do.

Moreover, I bought together a few people and carried out a focus group. All of the people were aged from 16-19 so it was within the target audience. The focus group I think was just a bit more successful as they were in front of me and were able to expand on their reasoning and comments. Their opinions were similar to the survey but they were realistic so it helped me a lot.

After doing this task I realised how important feedback is and how much it can help you to improve your work overall.