What have you learned from your audience

feedback?

Throughout the making and developing of my products, I constantly gained audience feedback in order to get an outside opinion of my work. My audience consisted mainly of my fellow classmates and teachers which was great because they were aware of what I needed to be achieving. However at the beginning of my course I was not taking on board what people were suggesting to me due to the fact that I was wrapped up in my own ideas and designs. I started out with an actor that perhaps didn’t fit the character in the song and was told this when I first started to produce my tasks. Moreover because I had a plan, and this actor was convenient and easy to meet up with to film, I ignored these suggestions of a change of character and learnt later to regret this idea. I later realised that the actor I had chosen did not fit with the feel of the song and decided to change the actor to someone with more of a ‘scruffy’ look. I learnt from this that audience feedback was important and very relevant to what I was doing due to the fact that I was supposed to be creating a music video and ancillary tasks to please a target audience.

After this, I then took a lot of notice of the feedback I was getting from people and tried my best to incorporate their ideas into my work. When I was initially getting my ideas together, we had a session in class where we shared our thoughts on what storyline we were going for and what ideas had come to mind from simply listening to the track. I had come up with the ideas to include nightmare shots and the slow, glum shots to suit the music and to almost portray the unhappiness in someone's life. My classmates agreed with my ideas and added that they would include a story line including a troubled man who had lost his way in life or lost the one he loves.

Their ideas inspired me and it was good to get ideas from fresh ears and hear what they would do with the track. This initial feedback gathering encouraged me to gain more audience feedback as others may have ideas that would work really well in my video that I had simply not come up with.

I then continued with the tasks I had and carried on producing ideas for my music video, digipack and magazine advert. I did this until I got stuck and bored of the ideas I had. This was when I realized that audience feedback was what I needed to gain support and appreciation of my ideas or to gain other ideas and improvements to the ones I had already. I had an issue with the clothing ideas I had for the actor and therefore approached my peers for feedback on what they thought. Alice said she saw the actor with ginger hair and wearing no shoes. Emma, saw a bold character wearing a checked shirt with the top button done up. I also got feedback from my teacher who said that he thinks the character should be 'messy and dirty' and wear plain, dark clothes.

All of these comments helped me with my ideas and I then decided that I preferred the ideas of my character being ‘messy and dirty’ wearing boring and plain dark clothes. I also got feedback from my teacher about the photoshoot that I had done purely to give me confidence that what I was doing was correct and he could see the trail of ideas that I had been getting. I was pleased to acknowledge that he agreed with the angles of the photos I had taken and he also said that the poses I had put my actor in also connoted the correct message of sadness and depression.

I then gained feedback on the song and artist names. I had come up with ideas that I thought suited the song and artist, however, I was struggling to narrow my decision down to one choice. I got feedback from students that were interested in alternative rock music as I thought they would have more of an idea about what kind of names come up in the genre. I didn’t want the names to be too fancy or ‘pop’ as this wouldn’t display my artist in the correct light. I approached my teacher once again as he has experience in alternative rock and I also got feedback from George and Georgie, two people who are familiar with the genre of my track.

I then gained feedback on the song and artist names. I had come up with ideas that I thought suited the song and artist, however, I was struggling to narrow my decision down to one choice. I got feedback from students that were interested in alternative rock music as I thought they would have more of an idea about what kind of names come up in the genre. I didn’t want the names to be too fancy or ‘pop’ as this wouldn’t display my artist in the correct light. I approached my teacher once again as he has experience in alternative rock and I also got feedback from George and Georgie, two people who are familiar with the genre of my track.

I showed them a list of the names I had come up with and asked them to decide which ones they thought went best. It was evident that ‘bad dreams’ was the preferred name for the track and ‘unconscious living’ was the favourite for the name of the album. Moreover none of the artist names appealed to my audience and I therefore researched ‘UK male names’ on google to give me some inspiration. I liked the short name of ‘Dan Lowe’ that I had come up with

and this therefore changed to ‘Rob Young’ which my peers all agreed with. I used ‘Unconscious Living’ for the album name that has been suggested to me by my teacher and Georgie, however I was not happy with ‘Bad Dreams’ as the track name as it was too similar to the song.

I later found out that this was the actual name for the song which also put me off. I wanted something different and therefore discussed again with Georgie what she thought of ‘The Bad in Me’. She liked this as it related to the song as well as the album and artist name. It was good to be able to discuss with her what name to use as she is familiar with the genre and has a relevant opinion.

Georgie

I then got feedback from my classmates on the magazine advert. I was able to produce a range of ideas, however I needed some fresh eyes to help me distinguish the good designs and the ones that were not as relevant. My classmates best liked the designs with the character in the bottom left hand corner of the page. Therefore, I showed them a page of these designs with different text colours and also ones without the record label and ones with. I then asked them which ones most appealed to them and Isaac and Emma both said that they preferred the designs with the record label which then encouraged me to produce more designs with this included. I then came up with two designs and again approached classmates for them to make a vote on which hone they liked best. I generally like both designs and therefore this feedback was necessary for me to be able to choose a final design. There was a vote on the two final designs and there was a distinct favourite as one design got 6 votes and the other got only 1. I was happy with the design that was the favourite and therefore continued with this as my final magazine advert design.

There was a session again in class where we were able to show our ancillary tasks to our classmates to get their opinions on them. When I showed my finished poster the feedback I got was very positive and encouraging: "I like the continuity of the red with the stars at the top and the record label at the bottom, it works well“ - Alice"The space in the middle is good, it demonstrates a rule of thirds and constructs a heavy feel“ - Emma"I can see that it is alternative rock“ - Isaac

I also got the same level of feedback for my digipack from my classmates and friends who are interested in alternative rock which was very helpful. I made a lot of decisions for the digipack based on the ideas that I had got from the audience of my magazine ad. This worked really well as by this time, everyone was very focussed on their work and had little time to view my ideas as I developed them. I realized that feedback for the final designs was what I needed as I found it difficult to make final decisions on what ideas to use and what designs should be used for the final product.

This audience feedback was also present through the development of my music video. I commonly got my friends to take a look at what I was doing and allowed them to comment on what they thought would improve it. I think that audience feedback is crucial due to the fact that I designed a music video in order to please viewers and encourage them to watch and buy my products. If I had not included this feedback, I would have simply made my product to please myself and there may not be any elements of the correct genre due to the fact that I was not familiar with it. A final recording of my classmates was made of them watching and commenting on my finished music video. There were a lot of compliments on things they thought worked really well and praised me for and there were also points they made about what I could have done to make it better. This was brilliant as it gave me a huge confidence boost that my music video was decent enough for them to enjoy as towards the end of producing it, I started to get bored and tired of it.

To conclude, I learned a lot from my audience feedback and the points I have made in my

answer demonstrate this.