What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

At this level my audience feedback is going to be qualitative as a pose to quantitative as this type of research would require a lot of time and money and may also not even be as useful or revealing as qualitative methods.

Once my music video was complete I had to gather some audience feedback from people who fitted my target audience. In order to do this I took advantage of the media 2.0 and social networking sites such as Facebook as well recording one persons feedback and uploading this to YouTube.

This is a screen shot I have taken showing some audience feedback I received of Facebook. I embedded my video into a message on Facebook and sent it to a selection of my friends.

This particular piece of feedback was written by a female, aged 29. Her overall views on the video were that it had an atmospheric feel to it which encapsulates the mood of the song, through the use of location and the soft hues I have created through editing. From this I have gathered that my editing and the way I have constructed the video through the use of colours has made my video pleasurable for her to watch.

She mentions the apples being a nice feature and the colour of them stands out from the rest of the footage and 'leaps of the screen.' This is an interesting comment as I hadn't thought of the apples being a good contrasting colour, instead I was mainly focusing on their symbolic importance and the entropic visual imagery they would create. The apples being symbolic wasn't picked up on by her, instead the colours and what they added visually to the screen was instead noticed by her. This shows me that she possibly didn't have a preferred reading of my video and instead judging by what David Morley argues she would have a more negotiated reading because she wouldn't argue the apples purpose was to symbolise Adam and Eve and instead make the visual imagery more appealing.

Something else I noticed from her feedback was their was no mention of the female model at all. This puzzled me some what as there is a lot of footage of her and she is big part of the story behind my music video. This suggests to me that maybe she was only focusing on the editing and over all appearance of the music video and hasn't really made a real reading of my video. It could be argued that she took an aberrant reading of my video as she didn't have the cultural capital to understand it.

She did mention the focus pulls I use in my video weren't easy on her eye, following this comment with a remark to do with her age. She is almost 30 and I had the same comment regarding the focus pulls from someone else over 30. Nobody else under 30 commented on the focus pulls in a negative way, which suggests to me that although she was only mentioning her name in a joky manner, perhaps age does play a part when it comes to effects and what's easy on the eye.

An example of one of the focus pulls in my video is shown through screen shots below.

Instead she said how she felt that the effect of layering two pieces of footage over the top of each other to create the ghost effect was much more effective and easy on the eye. Again she did not state what effect this had on the story of the video its self, instead purely how this created a pleasurable viewing.

Here is an example of this effect show through a screen shot.

Here is a video showing some more audience feedback I received.

This time of a 39 year old, again female.

Similarly to the audience feedback above the use of soft colours was straight away mentioned as a pleasurable feature in my video, along side with the setting I used to film my footage. She said that theses features contributed to a romantic feel with an air of mystery and she was curious to know more about the couple.

I have interpreted her reading as preferred one as she has picked out all the key features such as the apples being symbolic and the use of my editing technique of layering footage to make my female model look like a ghost. How ever she did have to question the symbolic reference of the apples, but she knew they were their for a reason. I feel that this is because she is used to watching folk video's which often contain visual imagery which has a deeper meaning, as I have shown in question 1.

She managed to understand that the female was imagined and she created a further reading into the female by reading deeper into my video and questioning if the couple longed to be together and simply couldn't.

She states in the video she knows about folk music and the colours I have used, along side with the dress style and the use of filming my artist with his instrument all works well together and fits clearly into the genre of folk music and are features used in the industry.

Instead of just watching the footage and commenting on that alone she linked the video back to the song its self and how they worked together. Her views on this are that the footage reflected the song, so there for she with out realising is labelling my music video as an amplifying one as my footage is adding to the music.

Interestingly the same negative feedback as in the one the above was mentioned again. The use of focus pulls in my video. How ever the feedback is slightly different here as she is not totally opposed to it and instead says how she can see how some of it works in certain places, but that in other places it stays out of focus for to long or occurs to much. On reflection and re-visiting my video I can see exactly where my audience is coming from when watching a certain clip of the video where the footage is possibly out of focus for slightly too long.

Here is this clip.

Over all I have come to the conclusion through my audience feedback that through the use of the colours I have incorporated into my video through the setting of my video, the added visual imagery of the apples and the summers glow I have created a product which is suitable to target a folksy/acoustic audience. But factors which I hadn't picked up on as a negative features before hand have now been brought to light through this research.
Nearly all of my audience research showed that they took a preferred reading on my video, bar the one piece of research I received which I have used as an example on this blog which instead took a slightly more negotiated reading.