What have I Learnt from Audience Feedback?
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| Asking people to vote in my polls on Facebook |
Throughout planning, creating and evaluating my products I have learnt huge amounts from my target audience. My
target audience are aged between 14 and 26 and because of this I have been able to use peer assessment to learn what my audience like and dislike and I have tried to take advantage of this as much as possible as in order for my products to be successful they must appeal to their audience.
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| Polls on my blog |
One way in which I have learnt from my target audience is through polls on my blog. Blogger is a useful platform to gain information from my audience as it a site they regularly use and I used it to ask two questions, one about what I should call my film and the other regarding the soundtrack. I used the majority vote of both polls to decide what soundtrack to use and what to call my film which is very helpful as I learnt what would most appeal to my target audience which, in order for my text to be successful, I must do. In order to get as many people to vote in polls as possible I also posted a link to my blog on Facebook and asked people to vote on it.
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| First Version |
I also learnt a lot from my target audience in relation to my ancillary texts. As I learnt through my audience and
promotion research my target audience are incredibly media savvy and spend vast amounts of time on social networking sites such as Facebook at the same time as browsing other websites. This means it was very easy to get audience feedback by posting my ancillaries on it and asking what people liked or disliked. It's also important to post my ancillaries on Facebook as if it were a real product my film poster would almost certainly be advertised in the sidebar on Facebook and other social networking sites so I must make sure it grabs my audience's attention.
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| Second Version after I've made changes based on my audience feedback |
From posting my review on Facebook I got a number of positive comments but also some constructive criticism which I used to shape my product. One example of this is a comment about the caption of the picture not fitting the image and the two pages not seeming to connect properly. In response to this I changed the caption and made the "Review" section go across both pages to join the two. I then posted it on Facebook again and got much more positive feedback.
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| Image of me showing my products to my peers |
I also posted my film poster on Facebook but found that the most useful feedback for this product came from asking my peers in person what they thought about it. Overall almost everyone liked my poster but there was some concern over not including a certificate rating for it as my audience thought there were some themes in my film such as drugs and alcohol that weren't appropriate for children. I therefore added a certificate of 12A for it.
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| First Version |
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| Second Version with the certificate |
In order to get
feedback for my film I took advantage of being able to show it form groups within the school and interview the group afterwards asking what they did and didn't like. To start of with I showed it a a 6th Form tutor group and a years 10 and 11 tutor group. What I found especially interesting was how the different demographics responded to the film. The 6th Formers found the speech the funniest thing whereas the Years 10 and 11 found more physical comedy funny. I then experimented by showing a year 7 class my film to see if I had got my target audience age group right which I assumed was 14 to 26. However after showing to the Year 7's I have extended my target audience group to include 12 to 26 as they loved the film. They didn't pick up on the more adult themes such as drugs but really liked the way I created tension to then subvert it.
From showing my film to these three groups I got the feedback that the party section was slightly too long and the volume of the music over the credits were too loud. I therefore cut down the party scene and reduced the volume of the music.
First Version of the film with a longer party scene and louder music on the gag reel.
Second Version with a shorter party scene and a quieter gag reel.
The most important thing I have learnt from audience feedback is that my target audience was different to what I initially thought it was. This is extremely useful as it means my product appeals to a larger target audience than I realised and allowed me to get feedback from a wide breadth of my target audience not just my peers but those slightly younger and older. By gaining audience feedback it has really reinforced the way a text gains meaning from the way the individual reads it and no matter how many codes and signifiers a producer can use to try and encourage a preferred reading it is up to the reader to decide what they take from it. This was extremely evident in the way different age groups reacted to the text and made me truly realise how important it is to get audience feedback as it is only by understanding what some of my audience think about the text that I can judge whether or not my product is successful and conotes the concepts I wanted it to.
