Question 3

Question 3

• 1.
  3. What haveyou learned from your audience feedback? BY JOSHUA FERGUSON
• 2.
  Introduction  Audience researchwas quite important to us because our audience is quite demanding and are quite hard to please. The rock genre gets a lot of hate because of its style and people dislike bands just because of the way they dress and how they look/sound.  Initially the audience research I gathered was quite useful during the planning stages as it helped shape the products, I had come up with an initial plan that I wanted to try out to see if it would work and I put it out during the planning stages (Check planning page for reference) and I got some audience research on it to see what they thought. The general consensus was good but the criticism really helped me develop elements of it that really helped pull it together like developing the logo. The logo ended up being used for the final products so the audience research helped develop that. It also helped me develop the idea for the Polaroid’s and how we were going to incorporate that into the story and into all the other products. That was a crucial part of the development too.
• 3.
  What I havelearnt  I have learnt a lot about the genre itself thanks to the audience research we got from our survey monkey. I learnt how I should structure the music video and as lead cameraman it was important I got it to work and the audience told me they wanted an equal performance for narrative and performance, this really helped us shape our entire music video as we decided on using the performance in the studio (Chorus sections in particular). This ended being a key plot part to our music video too so the audience research really helped me make the music video what it was.  We had media expert feedback from people who are experienced in the genre and we created a presentation and also collected some research from that pitch. We found out that it was important to be coherent with our brand identity. This is because I needed to it to be clear and simple, that is why I ended up going for simple colours instead of complex patterns and hard to read text. I ended up going for a simple 3 colour pattern (Blue, Black and cream). This worked nicely and it was useful to know that the audience wanted simplicity over complicated patterns. I think this really helped develop the products as our original idea was to go quite complex and get a pattern to use but we decided against it after getting feedback.
• 4.
   During thefinal idea development we were choosing our actors and I was quite conscious of the stereotypes and the audience didn’t want an overdressed, makeup wearing male for this. I wanted to get as much research as possible to try and stop this from happening and to try and please as many people as I could, from the audience feedback I learned that the audience wanted a more chilled out vocalist who doesn’t overdress for attention and actually looked like he was there to make music because he loves it. I wanted to realise this and make this a driving point for choosing an actor, I decided on using the male actor we did use because he looked quite chill and still had that rock look. The audience feedback helped me choose a more toned down actor that actually ended up working a lot better than I thought which proves that the audience feedback was invaluable. This was the same for the female actor, they wanted a raw video with a real looking girl, they didn’t want fake and that’s what we went with, a stripped down version of most females in the stereotype. Final Idea Development
• 5.
  Draft  After Ihad created the first draft I got feedback from potential target audience members and the feedback was pretty positive but I had a few issues that was pointed out by the target audience like lack of raw emotion and some camera angles, so with this in mind I went back out and re-filmed the sections that I was told were not as strong as the rest of the music video. We learned that the audience really wanted raw true power in the music video so I really tried to get it out of the actors so the audience could really identify with them. The webpage also needed to be more in line with the other products and needed to be more identifiable with the band so as a group we worked on making that more identifiable and that’s when we changed the theme up and added the logo and some pictures of the vocalist to try to make it more recognisable. For the digipack we were told it didn’t look ‘rocky’ enough so I took it back to the drawing board and redesigned it from scratch and ended up drawing it instead of using a real picture. This is where that idea came from and I ended up using it in the final piece.
• 6.
  What we didwith this feedback  After all of this feedback we went out and changed all of those thing I was told to change. After this I came back I was glad I had collected audience research because it make the products looks so much better. The final piece was given to a small study group I put together and I got feedback on it and they said it was much better than the products beforehand and they were impressed with what was created. Our teacher also gave us positive feedback that it was much more professional that our previous products and it looked good. The strengths that the audience research made this product closer to what I imagined when we first started out and I was glad we ended up coming out with strengths like the Polaroid’s and the colour scheme. Some areas of development I could do for next time would be to get a proper artist to draw the hands and allow for more audience research.
• 7.
  Conclusion Overall the audienceresearch made a massive difference to our products and make it much more grounded and interesting and it ended up working much better than we could have imagined and it was down to getting feedback and making those changes to please the audience.