task 3: what have you learnt from the audience feedback part 2

We gathered our audience feedback from YouTube comments and a focus group involving 5 students form our target age group, 2 boys and 3 girls.

What we learnt from this discussion was that they understood the video but all agreed that the narrative should have been more clear and extended. The comments on YouTube told us that the narrative needed to be more clear, that the online audience liked the dancers and that they enjoyed the retro 80’s feel to the video as well as the song choice but wanted to see more variation in shot choice.

We also heard what they thought of the digipak and poster and found that whilst it did stick to the ‘feel’ of the video they didn’t like the poster as it was to full and didn’t flow enough which I agree with as it was not complete, I will place the completed one up soon, none of them commented about the stencil being linked in the sense of rebellion.

The advantages of having used these sources to gather this information was that we could see where we went wrong in post production and editing of both music video and secondary tasks.  Having used a focus group helped us to see peoples reactions as they watched and real time answers of what they thought of the entire project. The disadvantage was that the YouTube comments could have been biased or unreal as people tend to feel protected and can say whatever they want from behind a computer, however this could come to an advantage as we had no damaging criticism to the video.

The feedback from the video showed us that people as a majority liked the dancers, the song and the style of the video as well as the colours; however it did bring to our attention that they did not like the way that we bolted through the narrative without much thought.

From feedback of our groups we found that what we had tried to encode into the video was read well, they understood that we where trying to show rebellion through teens drinking and smoking at a house party and they brought up the point that they did not find the band to be attractive, which was one of the points that we had discussed in our group to encode, this was done on purpose to display that they where sold on their musical skills as a band and not on the sexualized nature of them. This was evident when the girls in the focus group talked about how they didn’t find the band to be attractive but still said that they enjoyed the song.

We tried to encode into the video that the band are not sexualized and we did this by not shooting obviously sexualized shots like them thrusting their crotches at the camera but instead we focused more on them playing their instruments.