By Adam Day & Samuel Musgrave

Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We conducted in depth audience research. We held a focus group in our class with a selection of around twenty people from all areas of the college (media production experts included) and they all gave us detailed feedback on what areas of our video worked well with our genre and which areas needed improvement.

We took the feedback we received very seriously and it resulted in us reshooting our band shots for better quality shots. The feedback we received told us that our lip syncing was not as good quality as it could have been an that the band shots are not very good quality therefore it resulted in us reshooting all of our band shot in a a new location. Both the old and new band shots can be seen on or first few rough cuts and of course our final cut.

Although the version of our music video was in fact uncompleted it still received a lot of positive feedback about how our video is challenging the forms and conventions of a stereotypical music video like the fact that the production is set on a farm which is a very new concept to the indie rock music genre.

Our Research

The images at the top is a screenshot from our video before we removed the black an white affect which we had on all of the farm shots. We were given positive feedback about the affect because it was working in the intention we had for it, which is to give it an old, classical and rustic 1950’s look. It was meant to reflect the when times were simpler in the past where dates were simple and the farm also reflects this as farms are an old concept as there aren't as many farms now as there used to be. Farms in general are a an old concept and the black and white effect emphasises this.

Although the effect worked very well in reflecting the rustic feeling of the farm, it ruined the quality of a lot of the shots and the effect was not worth ruining the quality of our video to give of some effect, therefore we removed the effect from our video due to our audience feedback advising us on improving the quality of our shots. However we did not have time to reshoot our shots so we removed the affect the improve the quality.

The majority of the people who watched our music video and gave us feedback, from YouTube or from our focus group, all said that they enjoyed the concept of our music video being on a farm because it was different and it kept them watching as they have never seen a video like this before meaning that we were challenging the forms and conventions of a traditional stereotypical indie rock genre music video. However as we have already said, they all said it needed the shots themselves improving in terms of lighting, camera angles and refinement of the shots (lip syncing). However as I we have already said, we did not have time to reshoot all of our shots therefore we reshot the band shots, which were not as good quality as the farm shots, and as for the farm shots we removed the black and white affect to improve quality.

We replaced the black and white effect on our farm shots with the same indie red effect as we used on the band shots to give a consistent affect throughout the video.

Our audience feedback also told us that our mise en scene was very good, meaning that the setting (the farm) was very different therefore it kept the audience watching. Mise en scene is also our use of clothing and props. The clothing in which our actors were wearing was a good use of stereotypes. They were wearing very stereotypical indie clothing which followed the forms and conventions of a stereotypical indie rock genre music video. However the fact that the video was set on a farm and a pick up truck was involved is really breaking away from that stereotypical indie character.

We tried to break the forms and conventions of stereotypical indie rock genre as well as follow the conventions. We received very positive feedback about the fact that our music video as breaking the forms and conventions in terms of the main male character showing his softer side and not just his star image and him driving a pick up truck and even a tractor and living on a farm which is a little different in comparison to other music videos.

As a part of our audience research we created a survey using Google docs and released it online for people to do we also sent it to people in our Media Studies class to complete. It gave us an idea of how much of the video should be band shots and how much should be narrative, which was around 50% of each. It also told us that people would prefer a video where they know the band and the band members are also actors in the production. According to Andrew Goodwin this is one of the key requirements to make a successful music video (star image).

We asked people as part of our audience research what our general audience who is interested in our video and it is typically around 16-21 years old and around a 50% mixture of males and females.