Evaluation: 3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The reception of audience feedback is a crucial and fundamental part of the construction process for any form of media, but particularly one where the main premise of the product is to serve as a promotional marketing tool. If this were a real life media product, and we failed to gain any feedback in any form before releasing it as a finished product, it would set up a massive danger for us in that we would not be able to tell if it would be well received with our intended target audience, and thus if it would serve it's purpose as part of a promotional package for a band or artist. If we took this risk, and the product did not go down well, this could potentially be damaging for the artist who would have that reputation attached to the rest of their musical career, as well as causing a negative impact on their selling potential.

However, if we were to gain audience feedback in various stages and formats throughout the whole project, this would allow us to reflect and re-evaluate our product at each stage, ensuring we end up creating the best overall product that we possibly could have done. It would also serve to highlight to us any minor flaws or blips in the products that we missed, allowing us to make any appropriate amendments in suitable time before the finished products must be handed in, fine tuning it to create overall professional real media products.

One of the first ways in which we gained feedback was through the initial target audience questionnaire at the beginning of the project. This allowed us to pitch our rough ideas for our video to our target audience, and to receive feedback in terms of their opinions on our plans. Receiving feedback at this stage let us sample how successful the concept would be in theory, giving us plenty of time to refine the idea before we began filming. Luckily, most of the feedback we received at this stage was fairly positive. This told us that we were on the right track with our products, and allowed us to continue developing our ideas safe in the knowledge that the basic premise would be relatively successful and well received.

One piece of negative feedback that we received for the music video at this stage was that the plot line seemed quite unclear so far. We felt this was a fair enough comment, as we were not entirely sure what we were aiming for or hoping to achieve at that point, so we took this on board as constructive criticism, ironing out a basic comprehensible plot line and and narrative to make the video easier to follow.

We were constantly asking members of our media group for feedback throughout the entire editing process of our video - for example asking their opinions on certain shots, transitions or effects, which we could then reflect upon and take on board on the spot. This active involvement with the target audience allowed us to constantly be working to improve our products throughout the whole process. Once we had finished a rough cut of our final music video, we devised a shot questionnaire to assess the success of our product. We asked a number of participants from different age ranges and genders to feedback their opinions of the product, which allowed us to see if there were any final improvements we could make to ensure we created the best product we could. Some of the positive feedback we received at this stage included liking the way the representations of the conventions of the genre, as well as a certain level of empathy with the characters. This showed us that we had the right ideas in the creation of our video, and had succeeded in the representations we had hoped to convey.

We also asked for constructive criticism, asking if there was anything we could improve upon before we finalised our video and burnt off a copy. Some of the feedback we received in relation to this was concerning the rapid editing prior to the first flashback scene. We agreed with this comment, but we didn't think there wast anything that we could do to change it without causing a major hole in the plot of our narrative. We did however, go back over our previous clips to see if there were any possible improvements that could be made. This was incredibly beneficial to us as we did actually discover a clip that we could use in place of the poorer quality shots we already had, therefore improving upon the overall visual fluidity of our video.

These are some of the questions we pitched to our audience in order to gain clear feedback on our roughly finished video:

• Do you understand the narrative of the music video?
• Do you think the video is conventional of the genre?
• Was there anything you did not like?
• What could we do to improve upon this?
• Do you think the editing of the video matched the pace of the song?
• Do you like the various effects used in the video?
  
  This was some of the feedback we received from these questions:

In addition to the feedback for the music video, we thought it would be beneficial to gain a number of feedback concerning the ancillary texts. Initially, we showed rough sketches of our ideas to members of our target audience, who pointed out sections they liked - including the fact that the cover defied conventions by being from behind, and the cohesion of the costume and mise-en-scene in line with the musical genre. This showed us that we did not have to change anything in this respect as we were clearly on track with conveying the ideas about our genre and impressions.

Some negative feedback we received at this stage was that they did not seem to like the writing on the arm that we intended to use as the text style on our CD cover. We took this on board and started to plan different styles in which we could incorporate this onto our CD cover in a more visually pleasing manner.

These are some of the questions we asked for the evaluation of these products:

• Can you see synergy between the video and the ancillary texts?
• Do you think these texts fit the generic styles and conventions of real media products?
• Do you find these texts to be visually appealing?