Evaluation Q3 - What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?

N'SYNC were a major Boy band in the late 90's, when they released their first album, which was self-titled ' N'SYNC' in 1997, they became one of the most popular Boy bands of the teen pop and R&B genre. This meant that by the time they released their second album in 2000, their fan base had increased, with the majority being females ranging from the ages of 10 - 25. So based on this we decided due the baby faced image of N'SYNC in the 90's and the genre of music they were involved in, the primary audience would most probably been between the age range of 12 - 24, and the secondary audience being between the ages of 24 - 44 , as they would remember the songs from their childhood, also we decided that there could be a tween age 8-12, and possibly a homosexual audience. 


In order to confirm our findings we conducted interviews with female and male teenagers our between 17 and 18 in order to see, what gender and age are most likely to remember songs from 90's Boy Band's and N'SYNC. 


We showed 2 females Sophie Dixon and Katie Mallows and 2 males Harry Knight and Keiran Mitchell these pictures of 90's Boy Bands : 

Here is on example of an interview we conducted : 


Audience from Melodie Abraham on Vimeo.


Here is another interview we conducted with Sophie and Katie who are fellow pupils in our year :




From this we found out that, female were more prominent in remembering these 90's bands, which confirmed our thoughts  on which gender our music video would be more appealing towards .. our answer was Females. Also from our research we discovered that bands such as Westlife, and N'SYNC were the most remembered, and had the most influence on people who were born in the 90's however mainly female. Where as Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Five and Hanson were not as popular and remembered. When asked which music people would listen to still now most peoples answers were Westlife, showing they had the most influence in the 90's and now. 


Doing this interview, helped us gain insight into how to attract an audience of this age range now, ideas included such as : 

• Adding a modern touch to our band, by for example changing the clothing to be more modern and up to date, making the band members look more attractive, appealing more to a young teenage audience 
• Also if sometimes you could cater to a homosexual audience, young, attractive males may introduce the ' pink pound theory '. 
• Also by using attractive females in the music video, for our narrative we could be introducing the ' male gaze ' theory by Laura Mulvey. Which would make the female desirable and there for visual pleasure for the male, this could help make more males watch our video, decreasing the gender gap of audiences. 

Music Video 

In order to gain audience feedback for our music video, we filmed a variety of rough cuts, and placed them on social networking sites such as facebook, and online music forums, also Youtube and we also screen them to the class. 

To begin with we created a 1.00 sample scene which was based on our narrative, in this sample we had the lead narrative male, also as the lead band member reminiscing on his relationship : 

When we showed this to the class, we gained vital feedback which changed our music video completely in some way. Originally we were going to have the lead male vocalist, as the lead male in the narrative, however after feedback we decided to have the performance and the narrative separate, which then resulted in out next sample scene which included both performance and narrative seperate. 

This sample scene was 1.13 it was a short sample where we wanted to test out our idea of having the narrative black and white and too see if the performance and narrative being separate actually worked better. The feedback we gained was : 

• Members of our class said we had zero camera movement so this could be improved in our re-shoot of performance
• We need to re-rip MP3 and re-lay audio track 
• We could start with a group shot and then individually introduce members of the band.
• For our mirror shot for the narrative, we could maybe play around with layering. 
• Opening scene is maybe a bit to long for the narrative so cut this down a little bit.
• Overall we need faster paced editing, maybe some jump cuts.
• Bed shot - Multi layering and fade Sophie out.
• Additional behind the scenes footage of the band. 
• Costumes more together, more white colours - white t-shirts etc, bringing the group together more by having them wear the same things. 
• Simple Choreography for the boy band.
• Dont introduce boyband straight away.
• Dont need all of the shots of the main boy in narrative.
• More signifier of relationship needed for the narrative in misc-en-scene.
• For the narrative we could have Car Keys - bottle of drink to signify guilt maybe? 
• Ducks and bread for a romantic scene in narrative.
• Do want some skin showing, not just buttoned up.

This feedback resulted in us making changes to cast due to one of them not taking the role of performance in the boy band seriously, which would effect our grade and video a lot. Due to the nature of the song the boy band had to take things seriously more often, and this was a major problem sometimes with certain members. Also our feedback made us play around more with the layering of Sophie and Charlie in the mirror shot. We also increased the pace of editing. We also came up with the idea of adding a whisky bottle to the narrative. This then led us on to produce our first full rough cut. 

This rough cut, made us film all the performance again, we also included a duck scene in the narrative, as part of a flashback scene, which was to show the romance, we also included more layering of Sophie and Charlie, we tried to tie them more into the band so layered the band and Sophie and Charlie together more. We also included more shots of Charlie and Sophie together for the memories and flashbacks. We also had to include more shots of Sophie in order to avoid having a homosexual reading. Shots were shaky and jerky in some cases so we had to try and either re-film them or some how use the editing software to disguise the jerkiness. 

We followed this and produced our 2nd rough cut. 

After this we gained feedback that made us have a few minor changes to make, we still had to include more shots of Sophie by herself, so we included the kitchen scene, where Charlie turns around and he sees Sophie, he turns around again and she is '' gone " which links in with the title of the song. We also included a memory of Sophie trying on dresses for Charlie, we added this to try show more romance. We also instead of having the flashbacks black and white we used an effect called Vignette, and once again layered in more of the band. We also shorted the ending and made the band more clearer at the end. We sorted out shaky shots. After we did all of this we produced our final cut!. 

Over all feedback was from many different audiences, the main positives were : 

• There was a lot of shot variation, which kept the audience entertained. 
• The effects used added a more professional look to our video, our effects were a vital part in our music video as our basis was flashbacks. 
• Some shots were liked by a lot of people, certain shots included layering where one member of the boy band, is layered into the flashback and looks at the couple. 

Digipak 

When doing our Digipak we picked our favourite pictures, and then went on to design our first front digipak : 

After feedback, we changed the name of the Digipak, from ' Best Of ' to ' New Generation ' and changed the front image due to us changing then name of the band. This then led to our second draft our Digipak which included the new band. 

For this one we used a blizzard effect, after feedback from our media teacher we decided to change this effect and try a different one. 

Feedback from this draft, made us realise that the front and back could just be simple pictures as long as there is a connection between the two, which lead us to designing our final draft. 

Feedback from our media teacher on the Digipak above, helped us come to the decision that this was going to be our final draft, we had all the basic features of a Digipak and as long as our inside showed some element of I.T Manipulation then the basic design of the front and back were completely fine. So the draft above ended up being our final draft, also as long as we could provide evidence as to why we chose black and white as you don't really see much of this, then we would be fine. 


Inside of the digipak, took many planning stages as we could not grasp a certain idea, so we produced a first draft : 




Feedback from this rough draft, stated that Sophie looked too out of proportion, as we had not shaped her correctly, by holding down the shift key when stretching in order to keep the image in proportion. Also the flowers were too feathered out you could tell what I had done, so they were not blended in enough, this was the same with the whisky bottle, due to us no longer having the whisky bottle in our music video, we had to take the whisky bottle out of our digipak. Also we did not have to have the inside black and white if we didn't want to. 


After discussion with the class, a fellow media student Jess gave us the idea of having a rose spread along both panels, for the inside, and petals falling off it and maybe placing the heads of the band in the petals. 


This feedback led to this final design of our inside. : 




MAG AD 


To begin with our mag ad had no real I.T manipulation which was bringing our marks down by a lot compared to the qaulity of our music video. When making our first draft it was a basic rough draft just trying to get to grips with an idea, and seeing what the band looked like, so we clearly knew before we even showed it to the class for audience feedback we had a lot of improvments to make.                  


                                                          FIRST. 

Feedback we gained from this was that we needed more I.T manipulation for example layering as we had none at all, and I.T manipulation is a major part of a mag ad. We also had to play around more with the fonts and colours for variation, we needed to include more about the Digipak as that was the main focus of our Mag Ad. We needed to change our ' available on ' from cd/digipak, to Digipak CD as they are the same things. This led to our next attempt : 

Again feedback from friends, media teacher and our fellow media students, told us we needed more I.T manipulation. We got told the NSYNC needed to be more apparent and visible. We needed to include social networking icons, eg facebook and twitter. We also got given a different idea, which meant we would include I.T manipulation. The new idea was to have a younger generation looking forward with their back to us, like our digipak back panel, and then have the band layered in, maybe as their reflection. This then led to our a near final draft : 

This is our 2nd draft. It shows our new idea of having a younger group of fashionable boys looking/ admiring at older boy band, then showing boy band behind. We didn't end up placing the boy band behind because we were not able to re-shoot with the band, so we layer the faces into the frame. We also used the lines created by the bench to write our text. 

This is the final magazine advert. I changed the font to the band name to make it stand out more and made the text stand out more. 


If we had more experience with final cut we would try to make the magazine advert include more image manipulation.

Audience feedback played a great part when we were doing this coursework, our music video took a lot of time, and with out the feedback we would never have known what to include in order to attract a teenage audience if we had not conducted our interviews with males and females in our school. We couldn't of achieved the best we had done, if we had not gained feedback by creating sample scenes and rough cuts. Although we have done this coursework ourselves, our main concern was the audience, if the audience did not like it then, our video would not have been a hit.