What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the production of our video, we have continuously learnt from audience feedback, making improvements based on people’s thoughts and ideas. As the target audience for our product is 13-19 year old females, we were able to ask for many of our friends’ opinions which we found encouraging and useful. Once we’d established the genre of our video i.e. romance, we were able to research existing media texts, such as Taylor Swift's 'Mine' music video and Rihanna's 'We found love' music video, and explore what codes and conventions they’d used to appeal to their target audience. We created polls on our blog to find out our target audience's preferences of film and song in the romantic genre, which helped us decide which direction we should take with our video, in terms of song choice and style.

After creating a first draft of each of my ancillaries, I showed my peers the products and asked for their opinions as to which areas needed improving. From this, I found that the fonts needed to be bolder in order to stand out, but overall the feedback gave me confidence in my products.

Before

After

Peer assessment was also useful when it came to editing the final cut of our video - we showed them our first and second rough cut, making improvements each time based on their opinions. After some discussion, it was agreed by everyone that the ending needed to be more definite (we'd previously used a long zoom of the scrapbook, followed by a shot of the sea which faded to black), so we cut the ending earlier, blurring the scrapbook until it faded to black. This was a much more effective ending, as the closing of the book in itself brought the narrative to a definite end.

Before

After

Throughout the project, I have gained much understanding of the importance of audience; I've learnt that a text, in itself, has no meaning until it is read or decoded by an audience. Therefore, it was crucial to continuously ask for feedback from our target audience because their opinions and ideas were key to our video's success. It's also important to harness the power of the social network because it's becoming an extremely useful way of accessing target audience and creating a buzz online proves to be a successful way to market products. I've done this by posting my video on Facebook and Twitter (see below) to make my video accessible to more people and receive their feedback.

Facebook

Twitter

By doing this, I was able to directly access my target audience and get instant feedback. I found that my video appealed to both genders, which has made me re-consider my audience as being both male and female teenagers:

Rach is 17 years old and is a fan of indie music. She enjoys watching music videos and uses Web 2.0 to share and listen to new media. We were able to get instant feedback from her because she watched our video on facebook on her phone on and immediately commented on it with her response. Rach 'favourited' our video on Youtube and added it to her playlist, which proves that she enjoyed our video!

James is a prime example of a male who enjoyed our video. Although he is interested in a different style of music, he still found elements of our video appealing and found that he could relate to our quirky male protagonist very well. James liked the video on Facebook and gave us his feedback in person, saying that he loved the locations used and it had a great narrative.