Evaluation: Question Three

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to get audience feedback, I produced a SurveyMonkey survey, recorded an interview, uploaded the video on YouTube, shared the video on Facebook and posted images on Instagram.

The qualitative and quantitative audience research I carried out pre-production enabled me to understand my audience and what they would want. The quantitative research was carried out using SurveyMonkey and the easy to complete surveys we created meant we were able to collect 60 responses, which gave us a rather large demographic to analyse and from the quantitative research we took very important information that strongly influenced our decisions. Those surveyed made choices like a strong narrative in the final product as opposed to a live performance and also the emphasis on album artwork for the digipak and album advert. The qualitative research helped us understand our audience, as we learnt from questions such as "If you were given £50, what would you spend your money on?" that music and image was at the forefront of our audience's mind and therefore we had to carefully consider these ideas throughout our process. Our interviewee for the interview below told us about how important he felt a narrative was in a music video and also how his favourite genre was dance, listing some of the sub-genres in to which Sub Focus has delved, and how Sub Focus was his favourite artist.

I posted a few stills from our day shooting on Instagram in order to promote our forthcoming video. The pictures were quite well received and people seemed to be interested as quite a few of my friend asked me what I was doing in a forest with lots of masks. In hindsight, had I used hashtags, I could have promoted the pictures to a wider audience.

Uploading the video to YouTube allowed us put our video in the location where it seemed the majority of our audience got their music videos for free from. YouTube's comments section also allowed us to obtain compliments and constructive criticism.

The bottom two comments were generally very positive and did not offer much in the way of improvements, but we were lucky enough to receive a very detailed comment from MegaBrayDog who told us what they liked and what they didn't (such as the black and white filter at the beginning) and what they would change (adopt a run sequence like the one used in the video for Voodoo People by Pendulum and Prodigy).

Sharing the video on Facebook was another way of getting feedback, although constructive comments were seemingly harder to come by. We did receive '16 likes' on our video, which suggest people did enjoy the video. Here is an example of the comments we received on Facebook:

They complimented our use of props and the use of beat-matched cutting. Obviously not everyone who watched our video was an A Level Media student and therefore some of the feedback was limited.

I think overall the main thing I took from audience feedback is that it would have beneficial to have had or to have allocated more time to promotion of the video, in order to gain a bigger audience and thus a bigger feedback. Established artists spend weeks promoting their singles, albums and videos and I think as a group this would have been really helpful had we found the time to do this. It is interesting that recently we have seen artist such as Jay Z and Beyonce release full albums on the back of no promotion, using their image and stature alone as the chief promotional technique. Fascinatingly, with the drive of social media, both these albums proved to outsell all their competition at the time.