How did you attract/address your audience?
Audience feedback is an important part of any kind of project because something that is great from your point of view may turn out to be a bad idea, a second opinion is vital. We decided that in our media production we would gather a range of opinions from various individuals to gain a wide spectrum of opinions in order to make our media product the best that it could be.
The first opinion that we started with was our teachers. Throughout the production process we continually showed our work to teachers in order to get comments and guidance as to what we could do to improve it. Due to our teachers feedback we made quite a lot of changes to our media product including cutting shots such as the cereal shot and the shot of the character walking from across the road. Our teacher’s feedback also played an important part in the development in narrative. He suggested that the ending of our sequence was too final. If the audience knows what happens to the character in the end then what motivation do they have to watch the rest of the film? This was an extremely valid point that we had not really thought about and because of it we changed the death scene into a thought by the character before he does it, showing him afterwards going back and hesitating. This just goes to prove the importance of audience feedback.
The next people that we got feedback from where our classmates, an important group of people to get feedback from as they are more than just media consumers, they are also students studying media and would critically analyse. We started by showing some people and asking what they thought of the product. We collected some quotes from classmates. Someone said ‘Its trippy, you used all those shaky effects that make the shots shake that kind of, is good. It puts you in the mind-set of the character.’ While somebody else said ‘That’s really effective. I genuinely felt for the character and didn’t want him to be doing the drugs. Especially the part where he was injecting himself with the needle that cringed me out, I could hardly watch. The ending was good also.’
This tells us that on a qualitative level, we had positive results and got some good feedback that told us where our strengths were. However it is also important to take into account what a larger number of people might think so we asked twenty people to watch our opening sequence and answer two questions. The results below.
These results show that although a clear genre wasn’t always present for a lot of the audience the large majority said that they would like to continue watching which shows that the narrative style works to help hook people.
Willheart 