EVALUATION
Question 1 - In what ways does your music video and ancillary tasks use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real music videos?
Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?
Here is a video with visual demonstrations, where I answer and discuss question 2. Below, is a document with my script on it. I included this as I feel it's important to fully understand the points I made and to show my understanding of my own work. Furthermore, it has extra things written down which I forgot to mention in the video. I think these are important points in answering the question which need to be included.
Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?
In this task I will be showing our music video to audiences to gain positive feedback and also improvements we could have made. From this task I will learn more about how to target an audience well, and how to improve me audience before producing the product.
Below, is a feedback sheet which I gave to classmates, friends and family. I asked them to give positive feedback and also some things which they thought we could have improved on. I summarized their responses in the document below. (scroll in doucment)
Who is your target audience?
Our target audience is 16-21 year old male and females. They will have an interest in music, especially indie or indie rock. They'll likely be studying still and working a part time job. They'll also be interested in other creative things such as art, writing and media, so our complex story line in a music video will appeal to them perfectly.
How does your music video attract/address your target audience?
The type of video we made appeals perfectly to our target audience. It has a narrative about love, which is a relatable thing for young people, despite the unrealistic nature of the story. However, this almost fantasy aspect of the narrative will appeal to the target audience as they like creative subjects such as literature, where you can create your own stories. It's also set mostly in a city/town and a house. This is relatable for young people as they're often living in these areas and the homely shots can feel welcoming. Finally, being an indie video, it features the kind of music our target audience listens to, and also has lots of instrument performance shots - which is likley to be a hobby of theirs. The characters are also seen wearing the kind of clothes/fashion our target audience wear and like.
As well as asking people to give feedback on our video, during the research stage I created a survey. The survey was to find out about my audience and do some audience research, so we could make a video which would appeal to our target audience based on the responses. Below are screenshots of the responses. Here, I can discuss what they mean, how they influenced our creative decisions and how this is reflected in our music video.
From question 1, we can see 70% of the responses were between 16-18 years old, with 19-22+ making up the rest. For this reason we chose to start our target market age at 16 and extend it to 21, as this is the majority ages in the responses.
More of our responses were female, but that could be due to the odd number of responses. However, a story line about love is generally preferred by girls than boys, so that could be reflected by the survey.
Clearly, it's essential that our target audience like music videos - as that is what we're making.
This is an important question, as it helped gauge the amount of time our target audience spend watching the videos, and how much our video would need to stand out among a crowd. If our audience will only watch them for songs they like, we needed to make sure to choose an original indie rock song.
Interestingly, for question 5, 40% of the answers were made up of rap. I think this is probably because this is a hugely popular genre now, and if indie isn't for you rap might be the next go to choice. However, the other 60% is made up of indie, so we know we're still hitting the target market. To make our video appeal to those 40% we chose to subtly include some rap video conventions into our video - such as money and stealing/guns.
Sweater Weather was a video we were very inspired by from the start - especially the beach scenes. This response proves we're hitting the right audience by sharing similar inspirations. Similar goes for Lovesick, as it uses lots of urban locations such as car parks, so the similarities will mean the audience will like our video and its locations.
The third response likes an urban and stylish look, so we aimed for this with cityscapes and grey cool tones in our video. The last response likes how Riptide - Vance Joy (previous question) uses images of the lyrics. This links to Andrew Goodwin's theory that music videos are simply an extension of the lyrics, and we used this multiple times throughout our music video.
We initially wanted to use black and white in our music video as it's conventional, and the first answer in this response supports that. We decided not to use the black and white as it sdidn't suit our video.
The second response says they like good narrative, costume and hidden messages. Our video has a strong narrative ans we really focused on the costumes. It does necessarily have hidden meaning, but the narrative is meaningful. Knowing the audience likes these things and they're seen in our video means the target audience will like our video.
100% of the responses chose instruments, as they're really essential to almost any music video, especially indie. We made sure to use loads of shots of instruments in the performance sections of the video.
Having read these responses we made a real point of really focusing on our costume, as it's clearly a huge part of defining an indie video. All the responses talk about black clothing and leather, so we chose to use this in our video.
The last question asked about setting. The responses were all quite similar, urban, dark, edgy or staged/in front of a crowd. We would have liked to have had some of the performance shots in front of a crowd, however we felt it would be too hard to do successfully. Instead, we opted for the urban locations with a dark edgy feel.
Overall, I've learnt a lot from my audience research. Specific to our project, the general feedback says we need to re-consider the structure of our narrative. We could also add some extra lip syncing footage and colour correct, just to bring it all together. Generally, I've learnt from this task that it's really important to do good audience research and get feedback on your work as you go, so you find out the information before and don't have loads of changes to make at the end.