Q3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Once we had came up with 3 strong ideas, we pitched our ideas to our class members and gathered the audience research from that. The pitch was well received and they helped us to see the strongest points from each idea and where we could improve the ideas to make them more effective. They all however preferred the first pitch idea, they felt that the barn location was a stronger/more conventional setting for the video and the narrative, using amplification will work to blend with the performance effectively. They all also enjoyed the song but feel it is hard to hear all the lyrics so felt we should use strong visual imagery in our narrative to help the viewer know what is being said, we also got that people liked the idea from pitch 3 being that there is slight more performance in the video as this is what a conventional hardcore video will focus upon.

http://prezi.com/0l4puyizl8q_/audience-research-questionaire/

After creating and gaining research from our pitch, this allowed us to home down onto one idea, we then decided to create a questionnaire to find out what people expected of a music video in general and a hardcore genre specific music video, we chose this method as it meant that we could collect feedback from a larger number of people within a quicker time period, rather than using methods such as internet polls or one on one video interviews, this also helped us to get a wider amount of feedback from different age ranges. This method of gaining audience research also helped us to quickly find the information out as people will use simple and snappy answers, we then we able to place that feedback into charts, allowing it to be easily understood. From the audience research, we were able to see what people would enjoy, this helped us to mold them within our ideas to try and achieve the best music promo possible.

When reading over the feedback we got from the questionnaires, one of the main elements that was picked up on was the editing pace, everybody we asked said that the editing should be fast paced to run in parallel with the tempo of the track to help suit the genre. We used this advice and because our track was a hardcore genre, it meant our editing had to be fast paced and straight cuts. As well as this we also found that people would like to see a narrative running alongside the performance, another aspect we have used. We have tried to keep the narrative at a 50:50 ratio, although there is a slight emphasis on the performance as that is what was conventional of a hardcore genre.

After creating our final products, we uploaded them onto a number of social networking sites, including, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This was to allow people to watch the video and comment on what they enjoyed and what worked well and give us any helpful criticism. As we created a video for our own band, this allowed us to have it exactly how we wanted it, making it more tailored to suit our band and genre and I feel this video is very effective at promoting our band and the song we have written. 

Facebook was the main source of our feedback, the conclusion from it was positive, people enjoyed the video's fast paced editing, effective ratio for narrative to performance and overall build up throughout, and we had sections such as the split clip which people distinctly picked out, which is effective as it shows us that the bold imagery we used has worked. The comment we had from YouTube is also positive and comments more on the aspects we have used in our video, such as the smoke and the lighting to create a conventional hardcore music video, and again she has chosen the split clip section as her favourite bit. As well as the split clip, she liked the graphic match at the end between the vocalist throwing the mic and then the male character throwing the spade. We also had a comment via our Twitter page of someone who enjoyed the video, we found that Twitter wasn't as effective as the other media pages as it has a character allowance, this means that we couldn't get a detailed comment and they had to be short to be able to be posted.

As well as getting audience comments via social networking sites, we also did a number of short interviews to get a further range of different feedback methods on our final texts. Using this method was very effective as it allowed us to get more of a personal answer on what worked well and didn’t work well rather than a yes or no via a questionnaire. This allowed us to see if certain factors such as the ratio between narrative and performance worked well. From this we have learnt that:

• ·       The editing and shots we used were all very conventional of the genre
• ·       There was more of a focus on the performance on the video, which is stereotypical of a hardcore genre so that worked well.
• ·       The video was stereotypical of a hardcore genre.
• ·       Sections that stand out are mainly the split screen section, the graphic match at the end and the introduction.
• ·       We had a split between people who would and wouldn’t watch it again. The people who wouldn’t watch it again said it was down to their genre taste and not the video.