NW, OS - Evaluation - Audience Research Question

- When we were preparing our pitch we made sure that we conducted our audience research this meant that at every step of development we were able to make informed decisions over any of our decisions.

- The first rough cut that we did was quite early on as we had shot early and already had a lot of our narrative shots that could be put into our video, this was our animatic / first cut as we had thought that it was best to put both in one and then got some research from this. Feedback on this was generally positive and gave us a chance to get more ideas from what we can do in our performance shots. It was very useful as it meant that we could see that our music video even in its early stages was meeting its target audience.

- Before our completely final cut we made sure to test it to an audience as it was hard to objectively think about the risks we had taken in editing and shooting and many of these worked however many of the drama studio shots of the narrative did not work so we had to take these out. We wouldn't have thought about doing this without our audience research and our audience also gave us a few ideas of what to do and a couple of areas that needed to be tweaked (for example to dissolves had to be smoothed and lengthened in some areas).

The target audience for our track 'William Powers' by The Maccabees would be indie or rock fans and probably more likely to be in there teens. This is because The Maccabees are a youthful band which inturn means the fans are more likely to be younger.

For our methodology we decided to use a few ways to gather our results. We used a survey earlier in the production for feedback of our concept and rough cut and a focus group for our final cut. For the survey we asked friends and family as we thought this would be the best way to do it. This was because we could gather results quicker than if we used survey monkey and had to post it on internet sites for results.

I gathered a few people for a focus group for our final cut. This helped us with feedback as I could talk to them individualy without any hassle and ask them for their opinions.

It was important to test our concept in pre-production to an audience because we needed to find out the possibility of this music video being made successfully and that there would be a target audience for it. The results showed that our basic idea of the narrative and the performance was good, however we needed far more research into it rather thatn having small amounts of evidence to try and back up what we were trying to accomplish would work.



http://www.youtube.com/user/Group8TWGSB#p/u/9/KwqS5jFK-QU - link to our rough cut/ animatic.



We tested a rough cut of the video and the feedback was average to say the least. What we needed to do was rather than have long shots with a fair amount of gaps in, we had to increase the cutting rate and remove the gaps with filler shots.

Finally we carried out a focus group to gather results for our video. I carried out two, one with my family and another with a small group of my friends. After watching the video the feedback was very positive. Bits we had to improve on, or could have improved on were the syncing of the drummer, which was off in quite a few shots unfortunately and possibly trying to make the narrative slightly clearer for the audience to understand.

We have also recieved comments from fellow students, here are two of them:

Cally12
'The band performance (apart from the drummer) was really convincing - they looked like they were genuinely playing this. I loved the shots of the band on the sand dunes, mixed in with the other band shots. Nicely done. Along with the beach-based couple's narrative. The only bits I wasn't sure about were the floating spotlit heads on the black background. Not sure how effective they were. The rest of it was great though, and nicely edited together.'

Sam
'I really like the song and the main singer (ol' buncey) is really convincing and suits the song, although the 'I must brave' lyric is slightly out of sync, otherwise the fading works well. Nice one!'



The digipack feedback so far been positive. When creating it I was concerned that black and white may not look that good on the covers but it turns out it has looked really good and many people actually prefer the black and white colour.

When I asked people what they thought of the digipack, one person said 'I like the effect on the band but I dont really like the whole album case being black and white'. This was one of my fears as I thought it may have been too boring but when i asked around some more the feedback was more positive about the black and white concept.


Below is a presentation using Prezi to show some of our results from the audience feedback.

Audience Research on Prezi