Media Question 3:

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Positive Comments:

We mainly used focused groups, questionnaires, telling our friends to watch our music video in person and also using the power of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to gain feedback from our music video.

The feedback we got back was mainly positive and as well as we also got constructive criticism too. I used an embedded YouTube link so that I can copy and paste the link onto my Facebook status to allow my friends to view the video. To those people that don’t have Facebook, I was able to use my smartphone when I saw them in person and let them watch the video and receive honest feedback from them. The majority of my target audience said that it was really good and appealed to them in a sense of feeling sorry for our main protagonist when he was deprived and poor. They also said how they really liked the location of the urban area to represent the main actor as that was just a perfect scene to them. This was really good to hear because we wanted to make our target audience feel sympathy for our protagonist when he is trying to come out of the urban rough life to get into the rich life. One person did also say that they liked the way in which some of the shots were done, such as the when the car came forward and close to the camera real slowly. However some people said that although it was appealing to them, they suggested that we could have done ‘more’ with the creativity of some camera shots that we took while filming, which is room for improvement.

We did however blur out the names of our friends who commented on the video on Facebook for privacy reasons so we had to respect that when we took screenshots of the comments. We got YouTube comments from people we didn’t even know but they mainly made some positive comments about our video, which was good to see because it shows that we are appealing to a wider audience around the world slowly and not just our friends in school. In addition to this, we did manage to rack up quite a bit of likes on the video both on Facebook and YouTube which made us feel positive for our hard work.

Negative Comments:

In total, we didn’t really receive many negative comments about our music video. Because the negative comments were so little and mainly positive comments, we asked people that if there was one thing we could improve on, what would it be? I first asked my friends that are outside of

school and the majority of them said ‘more actors would have made things spicier’, and ‘we should show more variation of the urban London’. I accepted these responses from my friends outside of school and gave me something to consider.

However, those negative responses were not enough from my friends outside of school, so I decided to ask my A2 media peers on their view on what could be improved as whole for our music video. Here were what some of my friends responses were towards improving the music video:

Kaheem Hudson:

“I loved the music video and how it looked. It was very beautiful and I really liked the way the camera shifted to the beat, I thought that went very well with the music video and was almost like the heartbeat of the protagonist. If there was one thing I disliked it was that on shot had a lot of ‘noise’ in it which made it look grainy odd.”

Rony Feroze:

“In my opinion to improve the music video you and your partner need to use a variety of different locations which could have enhanced the experience of either being rich or poor.”

Zachery O’Brien:

“As a whole the music video is solid however what could be improved is the continuity during the mid-stages. Also the scenes during the gambling/casino part had lesser quality which is the biggest negative I can give overall.”

By asking for feedback from my media peers, they gave me a much detailed response about the negatives of the video and what could be done for improvement as whole. The negative feedback really gave me something to think about, and if I had a second chance to do the music video again, I would make the storyline more realistic for the target audience to be more engaged in the music video, and also try to find a way to make the video more appealing to the target audience so we can get our main point of teaching the target audience to learn to be in control of money and be wise. I feel we could have done a lot more creative things when showing the differences between rich & poor.

For a mature response feedback of our music video, I also asked some adults to see their view on how the music video impacts them. The

majority of them said it gave them something to think about when handling ‘their own personal money’ and comments were mainly positive. It was brilliant to hear positive comments coming from adults, but that’s mainly because adults don’t know the codes and conventions of our hybrid of pop and R&B less than my media peers did, which is why my media peers gave me more negative feedback. Overall, apart from that it was best to ask teenagers, young and old adults to see if there is a difference in how they see our music video

The Future:

Overall, I feel that my partner and I did a great job at producing the music video. I feel that the negative feedback received does have a correlation with my media peers, and that was to be more creative with the camera shots and scenes. We respect that we could have done better with that, but we were using a very powerful HD handheld Nikon camera so doing those difficult shots like high angle shots, were very hard to do as we didn’t want the footage to come across as ‘shaky’ and therefore we didn’t want the final music video edit to look unprofessional. As an improvement we could have looked into using a proper HD camera along with a moving tripod stand to make our shots more epic and make the most difficult shots much easier to manage when displaying the scenes of the deprived side of our main protagonist.

Throughout the whole production, we did have issues of making a suitable storyline for our music video. Because we had this idea about money, we were trying different ways on how to show ‘money’ in a different and creative way that no else hasn’t thought of before. My partner did go to Colombia during the Xmas period and filmed some shots of deprived and rich areas of Colombia, so that we could add a variety of two different places and link them together (UK and Colombia rich and poor differences). But that didn’t work in the end and I feel that we spent too much time on focusing on things that we thought that were going to work, but wasn’t going to make sense to us and our target audience. Speaking of filming it took us a long time to get the filming done mainly due to the weather conditions that plagued us from filming when everyone (including actors) was free on Saturday. Some scenes were a little rushed due to the weather changing from sunny to rainy on a Saturday, forcing us to stop filming and not getting what we wanted done on time, which is the reason why the negative comments of ‘better creativity’ arose from the target audience.

However apart from all that, everyone involved in our production of the music video including myself and my partner all worked well and collaboratively throughout. We did have a lot of banter while making the music video as shown behind the scenes. Even though the music video production was slow, this did give us a chance ask people on what things that liked to see on a video about money, and therefore this gave us more

ideas along the way to think about and implement in our music video, but we didn’t implement all of the ideas people thought about. I see myself working with my partner again in another creative video where we can put more time and effort into our thoughts and ideas and definitely make it more enjoyable for our target audience.

What the comments taught me about making the music video:

According to the negative comments again, I have learned that it is very hard to please everyone, as everyone has different styles and different tastes to what they like in music videos. As an A2 media student, I could only do so much than to try my best and put things in that would make the ‘majority’ of the target audience like what they see in the music video.

The comments also show us that we must put more time and more effort into our music video and even go the extra mile to film on weekdays if the weather is looking good on a particular day. This will allow us to make our work get done a lot more faster and quicker, and will also reduce workload on us as a whole including the actors to get the important key bits all near perfect and correct. By putting more time into editing, we could have played with our creativity even more towards our music video and this will help make our music video stand out better and look more professional.

But however, overall I feel that we made a great music video and we did wonderfully well to create it to the best of our ability. We are happy with the final product and most importantly we managed to get the message across about learning to spend money wisely to our target audience which was our biggest achievement.