G324 A2 Practical Coursework Evaluation | 4

G324 A2 Practical Coursework Evaluation | 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Who are your audience?

The song we chose for our music video was ‘U.N.I’ by Ed Sheeran, who is an artist from the ‘indie’ genre of music. When defining the audience for this genre, dissecting it into five steps helps to establish exactly who we are aiming our video at and therefore how to create the most successful media text that will appeal to them accordingly. In terms of their socio-economic group, audiences of the ‘indie’ genre tend to be fairly upper-working class to middle class. Not necessarily wealthy, but can generally afford things they don’t necessarily need and rather spend their money on the things they enjoy, such as attending festivals and gigs of the artists they like. The artist that we chose is one that attends and has attended popular music festivals.  Linking in with this is their age group, and how they the target audience is mid to late teens, and even into the early twenties. They can afford to spend their money on gigs and music-related merchandise, as they don’t really have any responsibilities of what to spend their money on! In terms of gender, the genre is aimed equally at both males and females. Rather than the songs focusing on objectifying either males or females in terms of appearance, indie songs tend to focus more on meaningful emotions and the idea of love, that therefore aims at both genders. The ethnicity of the audience is mixed, as it is quite broad. However the ethnicity of the indie artists tend to be white Caucasian. In our video, both actors/actresses were of this ethnic origin. Due to there only being two characters in the whole video, this is simply a coincidence and if more talent was required in the video, people varying ethnic origins probably would have been included. The indie audience’s lifestyle

consists of revolving heavily around a social life, both physically through parties and social gatherings, and online networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. They tend to be fashion conscious and aware of latest trends within their friendship circles rather than what’s on the catwalk. At the same time, they still have a relaxed approach to what they wear and it is generally quite causal. In our video we therefore kept the male character in nice jeans and a fashionable t-shirt, and the female character wore black leggings and a patterned top.

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With this in mind, when wanting feedback from the final version of our music video, we aimed to receive comments from those who best fitted in with the audience type we discovered, and more importantly; fans of this genre! Luckily, we found it easy to collate the data as our target audience was people our age, and therefore we could ask a mix of peers at school.

To get our audience feedback we decided to create questionnaires, setting them out in a way that allowed us to get the main information we needed through questions being answered on a scale of 1 to 5; with 1 being low/no/poor/negative and as the number increased it becomes more positive/agreeing with 5 being the highest.

This was a useful form of quantative data as we could clearly see how our music video was portrayed as a whole, to people. We were open to criticism and gave the option on the questionnaire to mark negatively, and also included some questions at the bottom of the questionnaire where further comments could be made. 

The Uses and Gratifications Theory assumes that members of the audience are not passive when viewing/experiencing a media text but instead take an active role by interpreting the text themselves and integrating it into their own lives in some way. Furthermore there is the belief that audiences view media to gain gratifications of some sort. Of the 'Basic Model' of these uses and gratifications, our music video is aimed to entertain and cause social interaction once the video has been watched. The narrative storyline is aimed to portray an positive message to the viewers regarding relationships causing a pleasant experience when watching the video. The narrative within the video follows an equilibrium, conflict/ disequilibrium , resolution, and then a new equilibrium. The disequilibrium causes concern when the female goes to leave for university and causes a sense of panic due to growing attached to the characters. The happy ending ensures a positive new equilibrium causing the viewers to hopefully feel happy once the video has been watched. 

I started with this question as it generalises their opinion towards the music video as a whole, and at the same time I think that it is an important question, as this is our target audience so we aim to tailor it so they can enjoy it. As shown in the bar chart the feedback was positive and indicates that we have fulfilled our aims of creating a successful video that appeals to our target audience. We therefore learnt that the approach we took to this video, although it was ambitious in some senses such as not lip-syncing, it was clearly worth it! Furthermore it is apparent that the uses and gratification's of this video are mainly for enjoyment and pleasure. 

This was a key question to ask, as when creating a music video you want to be able to engage the audience's attention through suspense and wondering what will happen, especially seeing as our music video was narrative and tells a story. Our video therefore follows the path of having a beginning, middle and ending and we wanted this to be clear to the audience.  We similarly asked the question that links in with the above, which is how well the video held the attention of the audience. The ending and enjoyment of watching the video, figuring out what they think the narrative video will end like, is a useful way of engaging the audience until the end of the video. 

The feedback suggests that the ending was to be expected, but not obvious that it was going to happen. This is the result I wanted as it links into audience pleasures when watching a media piece and once again supports this as being for enjoyment in terms of its uses and gratifications as a media text. The overall happy theme for this video - even though it touches on breakups and the kind of emotions related with this, it approaches it in a light-hearted way. We wanted the video to be one that the audience enjoys and would watch as a form of escapism. Familiarising with the characters in the video, this is what the viewer focuses on instead of anything in their own world. The narrative nature keeps them entertained and interested, and the happy ending would typically reinforce a positive message, linking in with Personal Identity, because in seeing the eventual success of this relationship in the video, it could convey a happy message to them leaving the audience feeling positive reassuring that if they were perhaps experiencing a similar breakup, they could also have this 'happy ending' that is featured in some existing music videos. As the audience are young adults, they will be experiencing new romances and breakups and this is something that will be familiar to them. Although this sounds slightly cheesy, it is still reassuring and entertaining.  

Similarly, theorist Deborah Knight believes that viewers gain satisfaction through knowing what will happen in what they are watching and what to expect from the genre. The feedback from this question supports this. In our music video, there is nothing unexpected or out of place to do with the genre in the sense that it remains a realistic narrative about a relationship. There is a basic level of anticipation in the form of “will they, wont they?” get back together, but the upbeat music of the song and miss en scène (lighting, surroundings) all connote a fairly happy story and the audience can expect a happy ending.

The feedback from these two questions are important to me, as we wanted to impress our target audience in this way. Fans of the indie genre are generally loyal to their favourite artist, supporting them at gigs and festivals and buying all their EP's and singles! There is therefore a certain amount of pressure to do the song justice, especially as Ed Sheeran has recently become very popular and his narrative videos that already exist have resulted in great success! We hoped that the video would do the song justice in this way, and the questionnaire showed that the video did live up to their expectations. Of course, we could not create a video that is equal to those already existing as we did not have the time, money or extent of professional equipment that the real video makers have! 

Similarly, I discovered that a convention of indie genre's music is to be meaningful, and the videos following the release of the songs are narrative. Such as Ed Sheeran's Drunk following the story of going out to a bar and getting...drunk! The lyrics of the song and the video are usually strongly linked, and we wanted to do this in our video. The feedback suggests that we successfully did this. 

The editing scenes in our music video appear to be have worked well with our target audience. In addition to this, we wanted to find out how one particular editing technique was interpreted by the audience and if they thought it was effective. We therefore included the question "What did you think of the animated scene being incorporated into the video?" with space to write their opinion. As we challenged conventions of the indie music videos that our audience would be used to watching, we wanted a more in depth analysis on what they thought of this particular scene. 

The feedback included ; 

"I thought it was unique and different, and appealed to me a lot."

"Very effective and clever"

"It added variety to the video" 

This therefore suggests that the ambitious scene we created payed off and I have learnt that this fits in well with the indie genre. 

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We also wanted to ensure that our music video was clear and understandable, the flow of meaning is very important to me. The scenes such as where there are flash backs and changes in time, in the short length of the video - jumping from 'then' to 'now' do potentially is open to cause confusion with some audience members. I was pleased to discover that when asking the video "Did you understand the concept of the video?" everyone said yes! I feel that we made this clear through distinguishing changes in time through changing the colour effect on the scene. 

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Of course, our target audience was our main priority, but we also wanted to gather the opinion of someone who wasn't, and to see if they understood the video in the same way. We asked our media teacher what he thought of the video, and surprisingly the feedback was pretty much the same as the answers of those in our target audience. It was also seen to be important to ask for his opinion in this way as he is of course a media teacher and therefore is knowledgeable in what makes a good video. 

The overall feedback which we gathered through our questionnaires was preferred Readings, suggesting that they liked the video which indicates I have created a music video which represents the indie genre successfully. From the feedback which is supported by the Uses and Gratifications theory, it is apparent that the main use of our music video is for enjoyment and pleasure due to it being an engaging video with a strong narrative. This is what we wanted to achieve as it is typical of our genre.

G324 A2 Practical Coursework Evaluation | 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?