What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Sources of audience feedback:
Youtube
– Advantages:
– Can generate quantitative feedback from the ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ buttons
– qualitative feedback can be gathered from comments
– People from all around the world could both watch and comment via the internet who were not in our focus group, therefore giving us a far broader range of feedback than we could have got from our personal feedback, focus group discussions and questionnaire data.
– Disadvantages:
– Due to copyright issues, the audio from our video was removed from youtube so it was therefore difficult for people to see how the video worked with the track, especially in terms of the way in which the editing complimented the music.
Vimeo
- Advantages:
–It allowed us to post the video complete with audio, unlike youtube.
–Can generate quantitative feedback from the ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ buttons
– qualitative feedback can be gathered from comments
–People from all around the world could both watch and comment via the internet who were not in our focus group, therefore giving us a far broader range of feedback than we could have got from our personal feedback, focus group discussions and questionnaire data.
- Disadvantages:
– Vimeo is not as well established as youtube and although it allowed us to post a version of the video to the internet complete with the track, it was difficult for us to benefit from a wider range of feedback due to the fact that unless someone was specifically looking to find our particular video (as it is not linked to the hurtwoodhousemedia youtube channel), they would be unlikely to find it. This therefore limits the range of feedback that we could obtain from vimeo.
F cebook
dvantages:
–Posting the direct link to our video on vimeo through facebook allowed us to access a huge range of people very easily. Posting the link as a ‘status’ or on peoples ‘walls’ was an efficient and easy way to get people to watch our video. The aim in doing this is not only to show the video to our friends, but to allow them to repost the video to their friends and so on, ‘virally’, so to speak.
–Some quantitative data can be gathered by the ‘like’ button on facebook, but more importantly, the comments that people left on the link were very positive and useful in terms of observing how they decoded and interpreted the video.
Disadvantages:
–There is no ‘dislike’ button on facebook, so the extent to which we could gather quantitative data from this source was limited.
–The fact that we used our own accounts to personally post the videos to friends means that the comments we received may not be completely accurate due to the fact that our own relationship with the audience could confound their honest feedback.
–It is difficult to keep track of peoples feedback and comments on the video once it has been reposted through other people due to the fact that facebook only directly draws you to your own post of the video, not other peoples re-posts of it.
Questionn ire data
Advantages:
–Due to the fact that we created the questionnaires, we were able to tailor the questions specifically to the relevant information that we needed in order to constructively interpret our audience feedback.
–Also because we could choose the form that the questions took we made the questionnaires in such a way that we have gathered both quantitative and qualitative data from them which are both useful forms of data in their own respect.
–Feedback attained from the questionnaires was focussed and truthful due to the fact that we greatly expressed the importance of honest feedback in this area, whereas sources like facebook may not have been as reliable.
Disadvantages:
–The control group that were given the questionnaires were very small in number.
–The control group were also all of the same demographic due to the fact that we took an opportunity sample as opposed to a random one.
One on one focus group discussion
Advantages:
– Discussions with the focus group were useful because they allowed us to ask further questions with regards to their initial responses and get more in depth and broad information from them than they were able to give in the questionnaires.
– We also found out things that we would not have thought to have asked about due to the fact that the focus group were allowed to give free and open criticisms, this proved very useful.
Disadvantages:
– The control group were very small in number.
– The control group were also all of the same demographic due to the fact that we took an opportunity sample as opposed to a random one.
General personal feedback
Advantages:
– We were able to gather some constructive criticism from points of view that were not just limited to a focus group or internet demographics.
Disadvantages:
– Feedback has a high chance of being confounded by the relationships that we have with the audience, i.e. they may just be trying to be nice.
What were the strengths indicated by feedback?
– Editing
– Props/ set design and assembly
– Good performers/ actors
– Successful use of after effects
– Successful camerawork (i.e shot choices)
What were the weaknesses indicated by feedback?
– Lighting (although this was due the way that the footage came out on vimeo and not our fault)
– Lip syncing ( we had trouble with our vocalist who did not know the words well on the day of the shoot, we tried our best to edit around this but it was still noticed by some people)
– It was not entirely clear to some people why the heads exploded (however most people who said this did say that it made sense on repeated viewings)
THE ENCODING/ DECODING MODEL
- The producer of a media product, (i.e. us and our music video) encodes a set of meanings and values that they intend to be decoded by the audience.
- Decoding is what the audience do and how they interpret the product.
- This feeds into the uses and gratifications model, whereby the audience gather their own set of meanings and values based upon the way in which they interpret the media product that they are presented with. There are three primary ways in which the audience can interpret media texts: NEGOTIATED, PREFFERED and OPOSITIONAL.
How did the audience feedback illustrate the encoding/ decoding model in action?
• Largely, our audience understood the main concepts and values presented by our video and I think it would be fair to say that we encoded these successfully due to the fact that the audience decoded the fact that the video was about the older generation coming after and trying to suppress the youth, but having ‘the tables turned’ on them by the active and cunning protagonist youth. This was our intended meaning.
• There was some confusion among some of our audience as to why the heads exploded, this can be seen as a negotiated reading on their part in that they understood the concept, but not why it was happening. They were confused to some extent in the decoding process, perhaps we did not encode the cause an effect of the actions clearly enough.
Audience Readings of our video
• Largely, our audience took our intended reading from the video, however there were some alternate readings that we discovered from our feedback:
• Some people thought that the ‘suits’ were either hitmen or agents
• Others thought that the ‘suits’ had been shot when it was infact meant to be the intensity of the music that made their heads explode.
• One person thought it was about a jailbreak!
Demographic/ psychographic profile of our audience and this affected feedback.
• Our focus group were all around the age of our protagonists and target audience and therefore mostly appreciated exactly what we were trying to say about our generation rising up and taking power.
• We found no significant differences in the readings that male and female members of our audience produced.
• In terms of general audience qualitative discussion, we found that the older the audience, generally speaking the more vague interpretations were, however they were still roughly what we had intended them to be.
THANK YOU FOR WATCHING
TASK 3
A