Audience feedback was very important and essential for us as a whole group. This is because it has helped us improve on our work drastically, and make clear and good changes to our final media product. Without the feedback we received from our peers and teachers, we could have not accomplished our final product. Upon receiving feedback during our drafts, it encouraged us to improve on our editing and camera skills. It helped us portray our final product effectively.
During our planning and research towards our media production, we were advised and told to have a specific target audience. This was because it would help us get an idea of what will be needed and expected in our music video. Therefore, we decided to make our target audience to be around the ages 17 to 25 for both the genders. We thought this was a typical and common age to be a target audience for the genre we had decided to choose, which was synthpop (our chosen song for our music video is ''Beating Heart). Deciding our target audience took us looking at different types of expected target audiences from YouGov profile of the artists Ellie Goulding, Lana Del Rey and Selena Gomez. This has helped us establish how we want our artist to be like and how we would like the music video to be structured.
Everyone in our media class was told to create a rough cut; this was a draft of how our final media product would look like. Doing a rough cut was necessary and important for us as it allowed us to work on the positive and negative feedback we received. Showing our rough cut to our classmates and teachers was a perfect opportunity for us to make the necessary and essential changes in order to improve our music video completely.
The feedback we received helped us reflect back on our work:
(Rough cut is below this presentation in the blog)
The feedback we received from the rough cut helped us improve on our work drastically, due to us being able to put a structure into our work, making sure it was clear, made sense and was not confusing for the audience. The structure of our final product allowed the viewers to know the the beginning of each scene. It was noticeable that the first verse of the song starts with the city shots, the chorus was the artist singing in front of a white background, the the second verse of the song were the beach scenes and the final shots were a mix up of all the different shots together. This was approved by our peers and teachers as they believed it was much more effective in comparison to our rough cut.
(Video of our final product is also below this presentation in the blog)
After finishing our final product, media students were invited to watch their music videos in the cinema. This helped us gain an insight on how the music video we produced has progressed with other students who have not watched our rough cut from the beginning.
At the cinema, when my group and my work was being played, there were enough cheers to let us know it was a successful video for other students too. This showed us that our music video was approved and liked by many others, also suggesting that the cinema screening consisted of our target audience (most likely) who liked the genre synthpop.
However, after leaving the cinema I decided to ask around and see what was liked about our music video and what was not. We received both positive and kind feedback suggesting that it was approved by many. But we did receive one criticism from a fellow peer who mentioned she did not like the monochrome effect we used, otherwise she loved it. It caused me to think that maybe others will be thinking exactly the same thing, and maybe there could have been more improvement done on our music video.
(Feedback from fellow peer is below this presentation on the blog).
After showing my peer, who happened to be my target audience too, they gave me both positive and negative feedback. They approved and liked the layout of the digipak I was aiming for (I wanted to replicate something similar to Lana Del Rey's 'Born to die' and Taylor Swift's 'Red'). However, they did not like the monochrome effect I used on my digipak, so it helps link back to the music video. This was because it did not look appealing and nor did it look nice. Also, they suggested I changed the picture on the side of the track list of songs, as it only made it look too plain. Below is my draft digipak:
After taking into consideration to their feedback, my digipak eventually looked like this:
This digipak relates back to the negative feedback we received after the cinema screening regarding the monochrome effect. It gives the audience an idea of how it would look in natural colouring and the edit makes my digipak look more appealing and simplistic.
I also received feedback on my website from my peer / target audience for my artists website. After looking at my website, they thought it was too simplistic and it had no edge to it. They thought I could do better and make it look simple and make it stand out at the same time. Also, they suggested I do not choose the layout of pictures and text together in the websites homepage, this is because there's not much to say about the pictures and it would not be relevant for the homepage.
After taking in their feedback, I decided to change my websites whole layout and design and ended up with this:
I decided to stick with the monochrome effect with my website, made sure my artists name stood out clearly at the top of the homepage and added more than three pictures, giving the audience an idea about the artist. I had some inspiration from Adele's official website, as I thought her layout and design is something I was aiming for. My peer thought my final website was much better than my draft as it was more appealing and did not look out of place.