3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Preliminary Feedback

Due to it being our first time filming and editing a music video in our preliminary, we thought that it was necessary to get feedback on the piece so that we knew what was aspects of our music video were effective and what we could improve on for next time in our main production. We carried out this audience feedback just before we began the planning process for our final music video production, the reason for this was so that we could understand what various potential audience members’ views were on music videos and in their eyes what makes them effective. In order to receive this feedback, we filmed a vox pop which entailed interviewing various members of the public and asking them questions about the preliminary. Overall, Vox pops proved to be a very effective method of gaining feedback because we had the ability to ask the same questions with various different people and they could explain their answers in as much as much detail as they needed. The main question that we asked the audience members was what they thought of the preliminary and how it could be improved in any way. Out of the three people interviewed the answers were that the positives included the Mise-en-Scene and the narrative, while the possible improvements were that the cutting to the beat could have been sharper and acting could have been better and more professional. This feedback definitely helped us in preparation for our production, with the feedback we knew exactly what aspects of a music video appealed to our audience members it overall gave us an insight on how we can make our future final production as good as it could possibly be. From this we obviously discovered that cutting to the beat is vital for the success of the music video alongside good acting, what we found out we can maintain in our final production is a good Mise-en-Scene and narrative.

Research

We also took advantage of receiving audience feedback in regards to our research work. We again made a Vox Pop and held a focus group, the use of a focus group again proved to be very effective because it entailed us choosing various members of the public, all of similar ages and we were able to be more specific with our questions in the process, for example we played our potential song for our music video and gave the applicants questionnaires and they could give their opinions. This was more effective than a vox pop because we had the factor of letting the audience members listen to the song as a group which would not be as achievable in a vox pop. The purpose of the Vox Pop was to find out audience members’ favourite genres and why, their preferred narrative in a music video and what makes a music video memorable. With the question in which we asked what participants thought made a music video memorable, we discovered that originality could be key, this originality could be present in the narrative, as one answer stated that an ‘interesting’ narrative made a music video memorable. On top of this, we learnt that originality could also be vital in terms of mise-en-scene as another answer stated good mise-en-scene makes music videos memorable. As another participant stated, the music video can simply just be fun and enjoyable to watch. This could influence our ideas for our music video production as we have now learnt that originality can definitely be effectively and in our production we plan to be as original as possible in as many aspects as possible. In the question in which we asked for the participants’ preference on narrative type, we learned further that people really enjoy a story in a music video. Out of the five answers we received, 4 out of the 5 chose either amplification or illustration, from this we learnt that people like to be able to associate the lyrics of the song visually in the video, whether this is an illustration where the video almost reflects the video exactly, or if its amplification where the key concepts or ideas are visually reflected on the video. With the final question, we intended to find out what type of performance to narrative ratio people prefer. From the Vox Pop, we did learn that people do in fact enjoy the presence of both, as we discovered that people would ‘get bored’ if there was too much performance or too much narrative therefore a 50/50 ratio would possibly be more effective.