Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The process of gaining and analysing audience feedback was an interesting process, where we gathered a range of both positive and negative comments. What made it very interesting was the fact that we heard opinions or points of view that we had either not spotted or not considered. We gathered feedback in a variety of ways - our main method was to simply gather people round for a viewing of our rough cut, then taking them away and interviewing them individually. As the majority of these initial interviewees were fellow media students like ourselves, they were able to offer us a strong critical perspective on the rough cut and how we could improve. Below is a copy of the interview answers we received.
Audience feedbeck by Adam Johnson
From this we looked at the feedback and found the following points: On the positive side:

• At least 2 mentions were made to the settings
  
• 6 references were made to the strength of the editing, and how it matched the energy and pace of the song,
• 3 points were made about the good use of lighting
• 3 points were made about the effective use of whip pan cuts between shots
• 2 people made the point that the video overall had a very distinctive style
• 2 people commented that the video looked professionally made
• 2 people noted the strength of the colour overlay effect.

Other positives included: the action and enthusiasm of the drummer's performance, the energy of the singer's performance, the professional look of the clothing of the band members, the continuity of the piece, the strength of the props/equipment used, and how it seemed to accurately reflect the genre of music.

Negative points included:

• 3 people made the point that there perhaps wasn't enough screen time given to the singer
• 2 people mentioned that there was perhaps slightly too much focus on the instruments as opposed to the people playing them
• 3 people mentioned that the whip pans were perhaps overused and sometimes caused the viewer to feel a little disorientated
• 2 people commented that they would have liked to have seen more shots of the whole band as one, rather than individual shots of each member at any one time.

Other criticisms included: a lack of variety in the shots of the guitarist, some mild errors in terms of framing of certain shots, a lack of facial shots of performers (lack of emotional connection with performers), and the fact that there were plenty of moving shots of the guitarist, bassist and singer, but most of the shots of the drummer were static, which seemed to clash with the other shots.

We also sent out a questionnaire to several people who had a chance to watch the video having been linked to it via email, and their responses are posted below as filled out questionnaires:

Response 1 was from an underground rapper, Shola Williams, who has experience of having cameo roles in several high-production music videos, so therefore he has great experience in this field. Here was his opinion, shown through the feedback sheet sent to him by Josh:

Response 2 came from Jordan Saville, a fellow media student. Here was his feedback sheet response:


We also gathered general feedback in a more orthodox fashion. I spread the link to the video out on the Windows Live Messanger social networking program, and via this I gained two responses, both from non-media students and massive AFI fans - Dave Clark and Ben Smith. Dave commented that it is a 'great vid, great camera work' with 'nice changes' (cuts between shots), and the only bad point being the 'slightly off lip synch' at one point in the video. Ben said that it was 'very good' with his only criticism being that, in the intro section, the 'drums seem different, out of place somehow'. But otherwise he said that it was 'top notch', praised the camera work and said it looked of 'very professional quality'.

One last piece of feedback we did recieve was from our media teacher, Ms Mcluckie herself, which focused on the blurred shots in the bridge - she believed that they were out of place and perhaps should be removed. But otherwise, she liked the video and the direction in which it was going.

What pleased us all beyond measure were the compliments we recieved about how it looked professional, as this demonstrated to us that our audience appeared to believe that our video looked like a credible media product. This is the best compliment we could have received, and to have it mentioned more than once is hugely satisfying. We registered very quickly that there was also an almost universal opinion that the singer wasn't given enough screen time, but sadly this wasn't something we could rectify easily, because a) there was a shortage of strong footage we could use of the singer, and b) it was an intention of ours that the band members would all get equal billing, and that there would be less of a dominance of the screen by the singer than most rock music videos, where the singer almost bosses the screen often to the detriment of the rest of the band. We wished to subvert this, though it appear we may have gone too far the other way. We were also sadly unable to really film many full band shots due to the nature of our location, with lots of undue props in the background, meant we couldn't get a real full shot of the band and had to rely on the fast cuts between individual members. Fortunately, nearly all the criticism that we encountered was minor, and they were small points which we could correct if necessary - flatteringly, most of the feedback was very, very positive, which confirmed to us that we were definatly heading in the right direction with our video.

This concludes Question 3.