EVALUATION 3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For my coursework I received feedback on both the main piece and the ancillary tasks from different sources. Sometimes this was from peers, as well as people who are and are not part of the target audience.

From the first drafts of the ancillary tasks it was said by all parties that the images used were boring and dull, whilst the choice of font didn’t add any value. Whereas a better choice of font would have made the images appear better than they were. Moreover on the digipak the conventions were all in place, such as a barcode and legal details, but a lot of authenticity was lost because the overall design was lacking any creativity. People of the target audience felt it was especially the images that let the pieces down and that this was where the main work was required, whilst older people focused on the authenticity of the conventions and felt this masked the poor design.

As a result for my final pieces I changed tact and went for something that was more suiting of my target market, as well as being a more authentic. I looked at fonts firstly and wanted to pick something striking and memorable. This is why I adopted the font used on ‘Brothers’ The Black Keys 6th album. Just it itself makes a strong impact (something the initial font greatly lacked) without the addition of any images. This discovery then led me to realise that a well-chosen font can mean no images are in fact required, explaining the exclusion of images on my two ancillary texts.

Meanwhile peers commented the record logo I had designed myself didn’t look authentic, as a result losing credibility for my artists. I subsequently chose to use the Sony record label and immediately this made my work look realistic as well as professional, just because of the more recognisable company.  

Regarding the first draft of my music video peer feedback was that it was theoretically a good idea, but whether it was feasible not being shown in the video. Whilst the relationship between the visuals and music was severely lacking, which made watching the video and hard to enjoy. This immediately prompted me to change the song because it clearly wasn’t suitable to make a successful music video for. I also chose a song that proved to be more popular among my target audience, ‘I Always Knew’ by The Vaccines. Meanwhile I felt improving the audiences enjoyment of the music video would come through a better performance from my artist so made a special focus to improve this particular element of my work.

The feedback from my target audience was that the video was boring and lacked any real performance. As a result I went conventional and eliminated virtually any narrative element of my video. This meant it was solely performance and as a result those featuring in the video changed, a) to better suit the song and b) in order to highlight the performance. So the video needed to be more interesting with a greater performance focus, as a result I watched performance music videos for inspiration. The one I really liked was ‘R U Mine’ by the Arctic Monkeys with a lot of the performance coming in a car, something I introduced to my own video. This was because it clearly brought a strong performance but also made the video interesting. However the video is also good because it stars Alex Turner a quality performer. To make my video more interesting I used the idea of stop motion, whereby different members of the band left the car and appeared in the band at different times. The basis of this idea came from a Drums video where they all start performing at different times, so I redeveloped this with the idea of stop motion. Such changes were vital in my video as it needed livening up, to make it more interesting and enjoyable to watch.

In hindsight I should have taken my market research questionnaire into greater consideration when planning my music video. Over 50% said they preferred illustration videos, something I did follow but not strongly enough. I focused too much on what was going on in the video, as opposed to the performance and the song choice. This was a mistake because indie audience are predominantly interested in the music and level of performance, all elements my first video was severely lacking in. Moreover the audience want to see a focus upon the artist in my video, which my first video was missing out on, so I made more close ups in my final video. Finally my choice of song was poor as it was not true ‘indie’ and had more of a folk feel to it. Therefore I changed the song as I have mentioned and this suited the indie genre far better. This combination of song an improved performance definitely contributed to a greater final video, compared to my draft.