Evaluation question 3

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

Throughout my project I have carried out a lot of audience feedback tasks to get different opinions on the products I’ve made. I tried to make sure I got a variety of different people to ensure I had a wide spread of comments and views. It helped me find out what things I had don’t correct and also what I could improve on to make my work even better.

The target audience for my video is females aged 13-25. However I also expect there to be interest amongst the older generations as the album is very old fashioned and represents the 50’s very well. This is shown through the props in the video such as costumes and also the microphone and settings as they are the key features to representing a time period and making the video look realistic to fit with the theme. The vintage old theme is very popular in the indie genre at the moment, thus it appeals to the younger demographic too as its common amongst the genre and similar artists.

During the project I collected feedback for all different tasks from my target audience as they will know best what looks good and what else they would be looking for in an artist’s work. I did this by showing them my project and filming their responses and getting them to write notes on my Digipak and magazine advert. I also used twitter to make my video noticeable to the target audience. I got numerous different responses from the video, with mainly positive feedback from the females in comparison to males who felt the video was too feminine. I also posted it on Facebook and asked my friends to give me feedback on my products as they are the typical people I have aimed my video at so they will give me the best feedback and will be honest. It’s crucial that i get constructive criticism back from people to make sure the products are completely finished and for me to be satisfied that they are suitable for the target audience.

I used audience feedback from my research tasks to help me very early on make a decision on what i wanted my products to look like and what theme to go for. I had feedback on my mood board in the form of a questionnaire to make sure i was going down the correct route for my music video and that the theme would be appealing to the audience. Also to see what the audience wanted to see in the market and what there could possibly be a gap in the genre that I could fill. This is where I got the idea of having a female artist as the majority voted for this. I also got inspiration from this to create a vintage and retro video as the target audience felt like this was coming into fashion and would be popular amongst people of that age.­­ When i then went to research into costumes, it was much easier as I knew what sort of era I was looking for and created a post showing my research into this. I ended up going with a long formal gown as the target audience said they wanted to see something that was unusual and stood out. Yet it’s still elegant, thus fitting in with the female demographic.

For each of my drafts, I got numerous people to feed back to me and tell me what I could improve on ready for my final products. I did this by showing them my product and letting them annotate it where they thought necessary, highlighting the positives and negatives for each product. From this feedback I found major flaws in my work, for example my magazine was hard to read and would have been better in portrait rather than landscape to make the information clearer. If I hadn’t been told this through my feedback, I wouldn’t have known and would have left it as normal. Therefore I’ve learnt that my audience feedback is helping me to improve my product and help me gain more marks for my work.

Overall, gathering audience feedback for various tasks turned out to be useful and vital in the process of making successful products. It helped me realise what i needed to change in order to match my products as close as possible to the brief and the specific genre of indie rock that I chose. I think my idea and concept is very unique and audience feedback has helped me build on it so I now have a good final piece.