Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our primary target audience is 13-20 year old females and fans of the genre. Our secondary target audiences are teenage males aged 13-20, young females aged 10-13 and young adult females aged 20-25. After finished our music video, we got together a focus group to watch it and give us feedback, filling in a questionnaire that we made.

After being shown the video and filling in the questionnaire, we compiled the answers and the common consensus was as follows. Most people enjoyed the intro to our video, with the fast paced cutting between the drums and band members. They liked the various set ups and they also like the slow motion falling shot. They also liked the final quick cut sequence at the end. On the other hand, many also felt that there wasn't enough energy in the video and that a lot of sections were too static, that the angles could be more outlandish, as they were mostly straight on. They also felt that the lighting needed to be better with more contrast between different shots and that the story was somewhat unclear.

We also created an online questionnaire to distribute to our target audience via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Above are some of the answers we received and many of the criticisms that were brought up in our focus group are present here as well.

So what I have learned from this feedback is never to use a static shot when filming a music video, as it creates a significant lack of energy within the video. I had noticed the lack of energy in the first filming session, as we had used numerous master shots for our seance/coffin shots. Once we had captured them and edited them into a coherent sequence, it was immediately noticeable that there was a lack of energy in the sequence. What had been planned was that the actor would make up for the static shot with more energy, but this did not work, because the actors simply could not create an energetic shot on their own. In later filming sessions, we added a circling shot to many of the set ups, but this still wasn't entirely energetic enough, which lead to the criticisms from our audience.

I also learned that music videos generally need to have the story fairly obvious in order for the audience to understand it. Our music video has various set ups that are designed to represent the different parts of the story, but because of the nature of music videos, they are split apart and generally cannot be pieced together in a coherent manner. It will flow, but not fluidly. Thus, a music video must be more obvious, the story must be more explicit than implicit, otherwise the audience will find it hard to understand.

Overall, we received a rating of 7.7 from our target audience, both males and females, mostly aged 17-18, but a few younger ones as well. This shows that we have mostly succeeded in our targeting of them as our audience, as they found the music video enjoyable and quite a few said that they would contemplate purchasing the album.