TASK 3
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
To gather our audience feedback we used a questionnaire, containing 10 questions which were handed out to a focus group of 13 people. The questions included, quantitive and qualitative data. Unfortunately our video was copyrighted and was unable to be shown on YouTube. Therefore we uploaded our video onto Vimeo. The reviews and comments on our video were very positive, reaching to around 450 views.
Our initial target audience was males between the ages of 16-24, from a working class background, with a violent/rough personality/nature. We understood that this makes the audience quite specific and niche, however this stereotype of audience member helps represent the star image of the band. Who have come from the same background and have the same personality which is signified through their music and video.
Therefore whilst surveying our selected audience, none of the audience members fitted this criteria. This makes our evidence and results less reliable.
Some advantages of using these sources is that for example, Vimeo helped us to gain access to our target audience. Vimeo is a video sharing site that brings music fans together to share their media.
Therefore our pop video could be accessed and viewed by a selected group which made it more exclusive. The target audience to our video is very similar to the age group of vimeo's target audience.
However a disadvantage of using Vimeo is that you may have to pay for the membership, and sadly due to Vimeo only being used by professionals, it was not as greatly exposed online as it could have been through YouTube.
Another advantage of using
Vimeo is that it was copyright free, so we were able to show our video without any further complications.
The feedback mostly indicated that the editing was the best part of the video, along with the special, after effects. The focus group enjoyed the rhythmic editing and thought the narrative made the video far more visually entertaining.
However, nothings perfect, so there were some weaknesses in our video as well. The majority of the focus group believed our video was too dark, and needed brighter lighting to help some of the performance easier to view.
The encoding and de-coding model is a theory created by Stuart Hall.
This theory looks into the message that the producer puts into their product a message which the audience takes away from it. The producer encodes a product with a message and the audience de-code it.
Hall claims there are 3 ways of de-coding a product ...
PREFERED READING
This is when an audience interpret and decode the message the way the producers want them too.
NEGOTIATED READING
This is when the audience understand the message being de-coded, yet do not agree with the encoded message.
OPPOSITIONAL READING
This is when an audience decode a completely different message to what should have been decoded originally.
This model was explored in many ways in our audience feedback. Thankfully, most of our feedback was a prefered reading. Our selected focus group, was able to answer 'correctly' to each of the questions asking about the narrative, themes and ideas. This was successful because we had made the message of rebellion and anti-authorism clear in the narrative. To help our target audience (similar age to the focus group) understand and de-code the messages successfully.
The readings that were produed were mostly positive and reflected the message we wanted to encode.
The quantitive questions such as, "Do you believe that the stereotypes were portrayed realistically?" - 100% of the focus group circled yes, and "What message did this video portray?" - 100% of the focus group circling 'Rebllion/Violence', helped prove this.
However there was more variation in other quantitive questions such as "If you could improve any of these elements, what would it be?" with the options of, camerawork, lighting or editing. The pie chart below shows that lighting seemed to be the biggest problem. Due to us wanting to create a dark and urban theme for the video, this has clearly made it very dark, affecting the video and its viewing.
The demographic and psychographic profile of my audience affected the readings as the audience were all of the same age and class with a similar socio-economic background their answers of course will all be similar. For example, the chart below shows the difference between male answers and female answers. The male answers reflected that the majority understood question 4, "What are your views on the performance?" Males seemed more interested and positive about the strength of performance. Whereas females were less impressed with the enthusiam of the piece.