EVALUATION: QUESTION 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

EVALUATION: QUESTION 2

How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts? 

EVALUATION: QUESTION 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Target audience

Initially, I knew that I had to create an ideal audience in which to target my media product towards. Due to the 'Indie' genre being so expansive I decided it would be best, as with most new products, to target a niche audience to begin with. 

The niche audience for my music video, digipak and magazine advert would be similar to the picture (left) with both male and female, white (Caucasian), late teen to early adult (18-25), wear high-street clothing as well as buy from independent retailers online as well as eBay, charity shops etc. Due to the literary connotations of my media product the audience would be mainly middle-class and fairly well educated, with interests in literature and possibly romanticism. They may enjoy bands such as Mumford and Sons, Of Monsters and Men and have an avid interest in Indie/Electro/Acoustic/Pop sub-genres. 

'Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a position constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader' of the text.' 

                                                                                                    - Gunther Kress.

From this, I can see what my audience would enjoy from the text and how I, as a producer, encoded the text with messages and how easily the audience can decode these messages. From the quote of Kress, it shows that a writer initially targets an 'ideal reader', which in fact can be themselves. The notion of narcissism within media texts greatly applies to my media product I believe because the target audience is very similar to the music I enjoy or the way I purchase clothing items, therefore meaning that my ideal audience is a demographic who shares my cultural view of the world, aspirations and appreciation of art, drama and literature. In other words I've made a music video for a demographic like myself.

Through this a notion of collective identity is formed with like-minded individuals. Also with the realistic representation of the majority of youth in Britain the audience can identify with the characters. This also moves away from Cohen's idea that youths are the 'folk devils' of modern media as the youth's represented in my own media product is completely different to the stereotypical representation. Audience members will view my media product for certain reasons, according to Blumler and Katz's theory, and it will be mainly for: 

·    Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine. ·    Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction. ·    Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts

From this, I went about getting feedback through Questionnaire and remote feedback via the internet (i.e. social media) to find out if my target audience was the correct audience for the way in which I would want an audience to decode my product. 

MUSIC VIDEO

The music video feedback was mainly remote feedback via the internet, such as YouTube and Facebook. We posted the video on YouTube after we finished editing to then post on Facebook to get some feedback, as our target audience would be our friends and people our own age. 

The video now has '531 views' and '13 likes' and '0 dislikes'. Although in terms of comments on the video itself there are very few just through the amount of views we could tell that the feedback was positive. With YouTube having the 'like' and 'dislike' options on videos - that users can rate the videos on if they enjoyed it - it enabled us to see that 13 people not only watched the video, but enjoyed it enough to 'like' it, which is vital feedback. The fact that it also has 0 dislikes shows that all of the feedback is positive and I learned that the audience we have shared it with enjoyed it thoroughly. 

This comment on the video by 'Luke Savins' echoes the fact that this feedback was completely positive. However, because he is familiar with the performer, Emily Greig, that we used in our video it was humorous to see his friend in a music video; also due to her being a very lively and funny person in real life, too. Yet, he ended the comment with 'This is really good though' - showing us that the fact his friend was in the video didn't distract from the video itself and he still managed to enjoy it - giving us more, positive, vital feedback. 

Straight after posting it on YouTube we linked it on Facebook and the comments above show extremely positive feedback. Comments such as 'Love this', 'This is beautiful', 'Looks awesome', 'This is amazing!!!' from the target audience demographic, being our friends and people our age. This was vital feedback to us because it meant that the audience that we had initially targeted enjoyed and decoded the video to point of expressing such passion in a comment about it.

However, surprisingly the majority of the comments were from females, which was strange because we predicted that it would be an even split or possibly majority male due to the band being an all male band, but with a guest female vocalist on this particular track. This gave me an insight into the niche audience for my product as the representation of a strong female character in video clearly attracted much more female audience attention. This also would go against the Indie genre as they mainly are male bands. Yet Kress states that Genre is 'a kind of text that derives its form from the structure of a (frequently repeated) social occasion, with its characteristic participants and their purposes' meaning that the audience will relate to the characters within the text, therefore female audience members will enjoy the video also. 

This method of feedback is extremely effective in terms that the feedback is almost instantaneous but it is negative because we only had '13 likes' from '531 views' and only a handful of comments from a mainly female perspective. The negative side of using this platform is that it is easy for an audience member to view the text without leaving feedback, such as watching the video and not commenting on Facebook or not leaving a 'like' on the YouTube video. However, by posting it on Facebook I received a lot of oral feedback from people who enjoyed watching the music video then told me in person when they saw me. Some of these people were friends and some of them were people who I didn't even know that well saying how much they enjoyed it. Although this type of feedback isn't so malleable in terms of physical evidence, it gave me vital knowledge that the target audience enjoyed the product, which was exciting and relieving to know our media product was successful. 

Email of comments from Ms Witting from our Tutor Ms B

Also, whilst editing we had feedback from another tutor, Ms Witting, and although she is not of the intended demographic for the text, it was interesting to get a different perspective on the video. The comments she made influenced our editing from that time onwards as the narcissism in our video had perhaps taken over due to our tutor not being able to understand the complete storyline. This was essential feedback mid-editing because without this we may have produced a video that only, us, as the producers, could decode the encoded messages, and the audience may not have been able to understand it as Stuart Hall states that the media creator encodes the message and the audience then decodes the messages through their own thoughts and past experiences. Therefore, this shows us that a storyline that was so obvious to us, being the creators and constructing the edit, was not so obvious to an audience. 

PRINT PRODUCTIONS 

In relation to my Print Productions, both Digipak and Magazine advert, I decided to use a Questionnaire and direct feedback approach to audience feedback. For my Digipak I asked 6 students 17/18 years old feedback on my product. I chose to do this because the Digipak as a product would only be seen as a physical product in reality, so therefore by using a physical copy of the Print Productions to get feedback it enabled me to get real feedback, opposed to only seeing the images on a computer. 

The Questionnaire asked:

• Overall Score /5: 
• Age:
• Gender:
• Ethnicity:
• Strengths:
• Weaknesses:
• Most impressive panel(s):
• Would this Digipak encourage you to listen to the band?
• Other:

Questionnaire feedback table

The feedback here was vital as a lot of the participants mentioned the issue of the text being un-readable as the original text was light blue and clashed against the purple so much that the audience in the Questionnaire said it was unreadable. 

Original Panel 6

Original Panel 1

Final Panel 6

Final Panel 1

From this I changed the text to white so that it was much more readable. This feedback meant that I was able to make necessary changes in order to appeal more to my target demographic. Overall, the Questionnaire was a brilliant way in which to get feedback on my Digipak, in regards to improvements and also appeal to the audience; in which all 6 of the participants said 'Yes' that the Digipak would encourage them to listen to the band. 

This type of audience feedback also enabled me to get a definite split between Male and Female audience members as I asked 3 of each gender. The main difference between the genders was that the Female participants commented mainly on the creativity of the product, saying that the photography was beautiful and the how the digipak worked together as a whole. Whereas, the Male participants commented mainly on the 'detail' and 'relevance', a much more analytical and logical approach. However, the use of strong, colour and strategically placed and contemplated images managed to appeal to both demographics equally, with all audience members scoring the pack an Overall 4 out of 5, with minor criticisms - mainly about the text colour, which I have as a result of this feedback. 

The only negative side to this type of feedback is that the audience members participating in the Questionnaire may not be completely honest in their negative feedback because I was in the room when they filled out the feedback, therefore paradoxically they were going to polite The only way I could have improved these results were if I used a blind viewing of a group of strangers, as the feedback could be more honest. 

I also had further feedback on later Print Productions to get vital feedback from my target audience and also tutors. From this I learned that the audience identifies errors within productions almost immediately, as most of the comments were about the placement of 'Kankouran' and the size of the text in the original advert. This enabled me to adjust my advert according to the feedback before publishing my 'Final advert' within the Print Productions in my Completed Productions. 

Original Advert

A lot of anonymous 'sticky-notes' on my productions said that the placement of 'Kankouran' on the bridge was distracting and the amount of large text on the advert wasn't needed, meaning they could not differentiate between the name of the artist and the album name. This was vital feedback as I wanted the advert to be extremely clear to the audience the name of the artist and then the album name - meaning they would hopefully remember the names and then ultimately purchase the product in a store or online. 

Final Advert

Therefore, from this feedback I altered the advert to this, final version, in which the text is much smaller and the band's name is much more clear. Then, upon asking the same demographic they stated that they much preferred this version of the advert against the original version as the text does not distract from the image in this final version. 

EVALUATE:

Although I have evaluated how vital the audience feedback was and exactly what I learned from it, I wanted to evaluate the process as a whole, too. Audience feedback, just like market research, is essential in marketing a product because the narcissistic nature of creators of texts can mean that personally it is appealing, but an audience may not enjoy it. 

By using this feedback we learnt that a storyline or motif created in editing isn't always easily decoded by an audience and the connection between producer and audience is lost. Therefore with audience feedback I was able to make the changes necessary to appeal to the target audience. 

Overall, the target audience thoroughly enjoyed the variety of mise-en-scene within our music video and understood the storyline by use of careful editing - with one of my friend even saying that the video made her cry. The links between the video and print productions were clear and the audience enjoyed the close-ups of the performers in both. Also, the use of the purple motif in my print productions was a repeated positive aspect of the product - meaning that my own personal ideas were enjoyed also by my target audience. 

EVALUATION: QUESTION 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

EVALUATION: QUESTION 3 (DRAFT)

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Target audience

Initially, I knew that I had to create an ideal audience in which to target my media product towards. Due to the 'Indie' genre being so expansive I decided it would be best, as with most new products, to target a niche audience to begin with. 

The niche audience for my music video, digipak and magazine advert would be similar to the picture (left) with both male and female, white (Caucasian), late teen to early adult (18-25), wear high-street clothing as well as buy from independent retailers online as well as eBay, charity shops etc. Due to the literary connotations of my media product the audience would be mainly middle-class and fairly well educated, with interests in literature and possibly romanticism. They may enjoy bands such as Mumford and Sons, Of Monsters and Men and have an avid interest in Indie/Electro/Acoustic/Pop sub-genres. 

'Each written text provides a 'reading position' for readers, a position constructed by the writer for the 'ideal reader' of the text.' 

                                                                                                    - Gunther Kress.

From this, I can see what my audience would enjoy from the text and how I, as a producer, encoded the text with messages and how easily the audience can decode these messages. From the quote of Kress, it shows that a writer initially targets an 'ideal reader', which in fact can be themselves. The notion of narcissism within media texts greatly applies to my media product I believe because the target audience is very similar to the music I enjoy or the way I purchase clothing items, therefore meaning that my 'ideal audience' would be myself. 

Through this a notion of collective identity is formed with like-minded individuals. Also with the realistic representation of the majority of youth in Britain the audience can identify with the characters. This also moves away from Cohen's idea that youths are the 'folk devils' of modern media as the youth's represented in my own media product is completely different to the stereotypical representation. Audience members will view my media product for certain reasons, according to Blumler and Katz's theory, and it will be mainly for: 

·    Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine. ·    Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction. ·    Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts

From this, I went about getting feedback through Questionnaire and remote feedback via the internet (i.e. social media) to find out if my target audience was the correct audience for the way in which I would want an audience to decode my product. 

MUSIC VIDEO

The music video feedback was mainly remote feedback via the internet, such as YouTube and Facebook. We posted the video on YouTube after we finished editing to then post on Facebook to get some feedback, as our target audience would be our friends and people our own age. 

The video now has '531 views' and '13 likes' and '0 dislikes'. Although in terms of comments on the video itself there are very few just through the amount of views we could tell that the feedback was positive. With YouTube having the 'like' and 'dislike' options on videos - that users can rate the videos on if they enjoyed it - it enabled us to see that 13 people not only watched the video, but enjoyed it enough to 'like' it, which is vital feedback. The fact that it also has 0 dislikes shows that all of the feedback is positive and I learned that the audience we have shared it with enjoyed it thoroughly. 

This comment on the video by 'Luke Savins' echoes the fact that this feedback was completely positive. However, because he is familiar with the performer, Emily Greig, that we used in our video it was humorous to see his friend in a music video; also due to her being a very lively and funny person in real life, too. Yet, he ended the comment with 'This is really good though' - showing us that the fact his friend was in the video didn't distract from the video itself and he still managed to enjoy it - giving us more, positive, vital feedback. 

Straight after posting it on YouTube we linked it on Facebook and the comments above show extremely positive feedback. Comments such as 'Love this', 'This is beautiful', 'Looks awesome', 'This is amazing!!!' from the target audience demographic, being our friends and people our age. This was vital feedback to us because it meant that the audience that we had initially targeted enjoyed and decoded the video to point of expressing such passion in a comment about it.

However, surprisingly the majority of the comments were from females, which was strange because we predicted that it would be an even split or possibly majority male due to the band being an all male band, but with a guest female vocalist on this particular track. This gave me an insight into the niche audience for my product as the representation of a strong female character in video clearly attracted much more female audience attention. This also would go against the Indie genre as they mainly are male bands. Yet Kress states that Genre is 'a kind of text that derives its form from the structure of a (frequently repeated) social occasion, with its characteristic participants and their purposes' meaning that the audience will relate to the characters within the text, therefore female audience members will enjoy the video also. 

This method of feedback is extremely effective in terms that the feedback is almost instantaneous but it is negative because we only had '13 likes' from '531 views' and only a handful of comments from a mainly female perspective. The negative side of using this platform is that it is easy for an audience member to view the text without leaving feedback, such as watching the video and not commenting on Facebook or not leaving a 'like' on the YouTube video. However, by posting it on Facebook I received a lot of oral feedback from people who enjoyed watching the music video then told me in person when they saw me. Some of these people were friends and some of them were people who I didn't even know that well saying how much they enjoyed it. Although this type of feedback isn't so malleable in terms of physical evidence, it gave me vital knowledge that the target audience enjoyed the product, which was exciting and relieving to know our media product was successful. 

Email of comments from Ms Witting from our Tutor Ms B

Also, whilst editing we had feedback from another tutor, Ms Witting, and although she is not of the intended demographic for the text, it was interesting to get a different perspective on the video. The comments she made influenced our editing from that time onwards as the narcissism in our video had perhaps taken over due to our tutor not being able to understand the complete storyline. This was essential feedback mid-editing because without this we may have produced a video that only, us, as the producers, could decode the encoded messages, and the audience may not have been able to understand it - and that a storyline so obvious to us constructing the edit was not so obvious to an audience. 

PRINT PRODUCTIONS 

In relation to my Print Productions, both Digipak and Magazine advert, I decided to use a Questionnaire and direct feedback approach to audience feedback. For my Digipak I asked 6 students 17/18 years old feedback on my product. I chose to do this because the Digipak as a product would only be seen as a physical product in reality, so therefore by using a physical copy of the Print Productions to get feedback it enabled me to get real feedback, opposed to only seeing the images on a computer. 

The Questionnaire asked:

• Overall Score /5: 
• Age:
• Gender:
• Ethnicity:
• Strengths:
• Weaknesses:
• Most impressive panel(s):
• Would this Digipak encourage you to listen to the band?
• Other:

Questionnaire feedback table

The feedback here was vital as a lot of the participants mentioned the issue of the text being un-readable as the original text was light blue and clashed against the purple so much that the audience in the Questionnaire said it was unreadable. 

Original Panel 6

Original Panel 1

Final Panel 6

Final Panel 1

From this I changed the text to white so that it was much more readable. This feedback meant that I was able to make necessary changes in order to appeal more to my target demographic. Overall, the Questionnaire was a brilliant way in which to get feedback on my Digipak, in regards to improvements and also appeal to the audience; in which all 6 of the participants said 'Yes' that the Digipak would encourage them to listen to the band. 

This type of audience feedback also enabled me to get a definite split between Male and Female audience members as I asked 3 of each gender. The main difference between the genders was that the Female participants commented mainly on the creativity of the product, saying that the photography was beautiful and the how the digipak worked together as a whole. Whereas, the Male participants commented mainly on the 'detail' and 'relevance', a much more analytical and logical approach. However, the use of strong, colour and strategically placed and contemplated images managed to appeal to both demographics equally, with all audience members scoring the pack an Overall 4 out of 5, with minor criticisms - mainly about the text colour, which I have as a result of this feedback. 

The only negative side to this type of feedback is that the audience members participating in the Questionnaire may not be completely honest in their negative feedback because I was in the room when they filled out the feedback, therefore paradoxically they were going to polite The only way I could have improved these results were if I used a blind viewing of a group of strangers, as the feedback could be more honest. 

I also had further feedback on later Print Productions to get vital feedback from my target audience and also tutors. From this I learned that the audience identifies errors within productions almost immediately, as most of the comments were about the placement of 'Kankouran' and the size of the text in the original advert. This enabled me to adjust my advert according to the feedback before publishing my 'Final advert' within the Print Productions in my Completed Productions. 

Original Advert

A lot of anonymous 'sticky-notes' on my productions said that the placement of 'Kankouran' on the bridge was distracting and the amount of large text on the advert wasn't needed, meaning they could not differentiate between the name of the artist and the album name. This was vital feedback as I wanted the advert to be extremely clear to the audience the name of the artist and then the album name - meaning they would hopefully remember the names and then ultimately purchase the product in a store or online. 

 

Final Advert

Therefore, from this feedback I altered the advert to this, final version, in which the text is much smaller and the band's name is much more clear. Then, upon asking the same demographic they stated that they much preferred this version of the advert against the original version as the text does not distract from the image in this final version. 

EVALUATE:

Although I have evaluated how vital the audience feedback was and exactly what I learned from it, I wanted to evaluate the process as a whole, too. Audience feedback, just like market research, is essential in marketing a product because the narcissistic nature of creators of texts can mean that personally it is appealing, but an audience may not enjoy it. 

By using this feedback we learnt that a storyline or motif created in editing isn't always easily decoded by an audience and the connection between producer and audience is lost. Therefore with audience feedback I was able to make the changes necessary to appeal to the target audience. 

Overall, the target audience thoroughly enjoyed the variety of mise-en-scene within our music video and understood the storyline by use of careful editing - with one of my friend even saying that the video made her cry. The links between the video and print productions were clear and the audience enjoyed the close-ups of the performers in both. Also, the use of the purple motif in my print productions was a repeated positive aspect of the product - meaning that my own personal ideas were enjoyed also by my target audience. 

EVALUATION: QUESTION 2 (REVISED DRAFT)

EVALUATION: QUESTION 1 (DRAFT)