We tried to gather audience feedback right from the beginning of our editing process. We did this in order to check if any parts of our video needed to be changed. We'd show a number of people one of our drafts and take notes on what they said. We'd then permit their changes to our video to see if it made an improvement, if we liked it we kept it if not we changed it back. We did this a number of times until we had no more criticisms from the people we showed. The comments people made are listed below:
- the main thing it the lyrical part of the video has been drawn in this one and we've decided it would look better if it was computer generated. It will look a lot neater and follow the conventions of others.
- the part of the video that is closest to lip syncing where the main talent is on the phone we also thought needed changing. The last part of this section goes on for too long and we think it will lose the attention of the audience
- Towards the start of the clip there are the lyrics 'I don't drink like everybody else, I do it to forget things about myself'. Originally we planned to have the beer cans jump cut section to appear here but in editing that never worked. We want to actually change this now as when we showed someone they picked up on it and suggested we change it.
- We also want to put in the voice and words you hear when you leave a voice mail when the main actor begins to speak in his phone
- The sign that Ash is holding at the ending also needs meaning to be put in it. It is the 'I <3 you' sign that is featured throughout but we got feedback that said we should just be reminded of this at the end. To get around this we will be putting a clip of the sign where you can read what it says in Claudia's flashbacks
- Feedback also showed us that the lyric section shouldn't move and instead the stills should be still with no ken burns effect on them, when looking at this again we agreed so our next draft will just contain the part being still
After we had made this changes our target audience were pleased and 95% of them enjoyed the video and 76% said they would watch it again! We tried to gather whether people understood the story behind the video and everyone we asked gave a roundabout answer as to what we intended apart from one person who thought they were brother and sister (why brothers and sisters would kiss like that baffled me but still, each to their own).
I then proceeded to ask some people who weren't in my target audience to see if they enjoyed the video as well. I asked a selection of adults and younger children. Most adults said they enjoyed it and that it was worth watching and complimented the video nicely. It was brought up though that things like Twitter and Facebook are a foreign land to them so that part of the video seemed a little weird.
The younger audiences that we asked didn't really like the video as they said it was dull and boring, apart from the doodle part which they said was fun! This would be the response I expect because the video isn't really meant to be visually pleasing but instead portray the story of the song, something younger audiences wouldn't understand.
This was a really important thing for us to do because what is a media piece without an audience, we created our video for the purpose of promoting the song and artist and their would be no point to it. One thing that I've looked at is a theory by Deborah Knight who notes that satisfaction is guaranteed with genre and that the deferral of the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of prolonged anticipation (1994). This means that audiences will actually like to have an idea of what is happening and with this comes another theory by todorov who suggested that narratives follow a certain pattern every time. He stated that all stories will start will equilibrium where everything is normal, there will then be some sort of disruption which will create a conflict. A resolution with then be found creating a new equilibrium.
Our music video follows this pattern with our equilibrium at the start being the couple in a relationship, happy, we don’t see this at the start of the video but actually throughout the opening sequence through flashbacks. We then see that the disruption is that the girl is leaving for Uni, I would then say the conflict was the fact the couple will have to break up because of the disruption. The resolution is the last thing we see and is the fact that the boy is waiting for her when she is about to leave, she then runs over and hugs the boy. This is the only glimpse of the new equilibrium we get as the video finishes here but this was done purposefully so that the audience could make up their own ideas on what happens with the couple.
Leaving it open also allows the audience to identify with the situation more as they can add in their own ending. This links into the idea of identification for personal identity being one of the audiences uses & gratifications as proposed by Bulmer and Katz. The audience will use the video to identify with themsleves, whether they have been in similar situations or whether they feel as though they are similar to the characters used.
Now I'm straying from the actual question asked! But I think we can learn as much from theories that we can from asking actual people. Though as said before audience feedback was really important during the on going process of our video as it allowed us to find out what bits weren't as good which we wouldn't have necassarily seen by ourselves! We would then make these changes and show a few more people to see if there were any more changes. We finally stopped this when people didn't have anything else they wanted to change. I think this was a much better was to do it than collecting lots of data once we'd finished our videos. At AS when I had finished my coursework I created questionnaires and asked people's opinions on my work, this led to me having lots of things that could be changed but I had fininshed so it was quite hard to do. Doing it this way in a less formal matter by just showing people the video and asking their opinion on it worked a lot better and produced a much higher standard of work in my opinion.
Now I'm straying from the actual question asked! But I think we can learn as much from theories that we can from asking actual people. Though as said before audience feedback was really important during the on going process of our video as it allowed us to find out what bits weren't as good which we wouldn't have necassarily seen by ourselves! We would then make these changes and show a few more people to see if there were any more changes. We finally stopped this when people didn't have anything else they wanted to change. I think this was a much better was to do it than collecting lots of data once we'd finished our videos. At AS when I had finished my coursework I created questionnaires and asked people's opinions on my work, this led to me having lots of things that could be changed but I had fininshed so it was quite hard to do. Doing it this way in a less formal matter by just showing people the video and asking their opinion on it worked a lot better and produced a much higher standard of work in my opinion.
