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

With our completed rough cut we needed to gain some feedback to help push our rough cut to the final product. We decided the easiest way to do this was to our ask our friends to view our video in one screening. This was shown to our friends who had not previously seen our footage with the majority of them not knowing we had made a music video. This was key to gaining non bias analysis of the video. The friends we chose for the screening of our music video are all of the age range in our target audience leaving us to hope all feedback would be positive as the video should be of their tastes and expectations.


The picture above shows the screening of our music video with the audience and the video being on a large screen. With the screening complete we asked to briefly interview the audience with the following questions:

• What were your initial thoughts?
• Were you shocked by the ending?
• Do you think the visuals correspond with the chosen song?
• What do you think are the positive aspects?
• What do you think are the negative aspects?
• If anything, what would you change about the video?

The video below shows the feedback we received from the audience after the screening.

Audience Feedback - Rough Cut 2 from WGSB on Vimeo.

From the video above you can get a feel for the feedback of our video being overall positive with some criticism, which was welcome as the screening only being of our rough cut.

Positive points

• Lighting
• Cast
• Setting
• Editing
• Narrative

Criticism

• Animal masks
• Child
• Hints too strong taken away from the impact of the ending
• Some scenes monotonous
  

This feedback was all taken on board and allowed us to make changes for our final product. The criticism we received was the main feedback we used to do this. The biggest example of this was changing the short clips of our characters holding hands. This is because our audience found it too revealing and took away from the climax of the video. With this replaced it works much better and leaves the aim of our video, hiding our characters identity, until the end. We also used the positive feedback as well using more of our fast paced editing to cut out the monotonous scenes the audience picked up on.

The feedback our group received showed that our final product was something that hit our target audience with each member of the audience relating to the video in someway, whether it being them waking up and regretting something, behaving inappropriately at a party, or the homosexual side of the narrative.

Here is a screen shot of further feedback we received via facebook on our final product.

This was the feedback Jonathon gave on Jordan's facebook post

'I liked it. Editing to the beat can be tricky when trying to hold up a narrative. But you pulled it off by using constant "flash back" clips. Also, the picture in picture effect contained just the right amount of shots. Overloading the viewer with information can draw attention away from the narrative flow.

The reference to the child, suggesting a forgotten innocence within the character, tied in well with the video's portrayal of todays youth.

Overall, the sequence included some well thought out editorial decisions and I was happy to see normal cuts, rather than quick fix transitions.

I give the Prodigy parody a 80%, I deducted 20% due to indieness.'

The feedback was great due to them being a professional. Although there is a jokey tone to the comment we can see strong positive points in the feedback and they have managed to pick up on all the underlining themes we intended to put in the video with the child, animal masks and narrative of the story by relating the video to The Prodigy's "Smack my bitch up" video which was a huge inspiration to the narrative of our video.