Evaluation Question 3 - Alex

"What have you learned from your audience feedback?"

When creating our music video idea it was important to get feedback from our audience. As we had chosen a song from the house music genre it was easy to find the right target audience. As house music genre, this genre usually targets men and teenagers. So for our feedback we made up a fictitious character to identify the demographics of our target audience called Dave who was a 22 year old Barman. When creating our music video we had to keep this idea of our target audience predominant in our minds.


This is Dave. He is our researched target audience for our music video genre. We believe that the house music genre is targeted at a young audience from teenagers to mid 20s. His favourite musicians would be the likes of David Guetta and Sweedish House Mafia who huge influences in the house music genre. 

Also, when finding our target audience we had to research a bit further. We did this by determining which music channels would play our chosen song. We used an on line provider Broadcasters' audience research board or www.barb.co.uk of weekly UK audience figures and looked at all the music channels available to us.

From this research we found that our music video would only be able to be shown on certain music channels and chose a few for it to be broadcast on. These were Clubland TV which brings in 142,000 daily viewers, 4Music with over 1,395,000 daily viewers, MTV Dance and 166,000 daily viewers and Viva which brings in a staggering 1,555,000 viewers daily. From looking at the research collected we could see that not all of the channels above would be able to broadcast our music video and I believe that these channels would reach our target audience of teenagers and young adults. This is because some channels such as Scuzz, Kerrang! or Channel AKA only cater to niche music genres such as Grime or hardcore rock and so our house genre would therefore not be suitable.

The main representations of house music videos are usually based around one protagonist, who usually tends to be a female, at a party. In our case we have made our protagonist to be a female who would attract our target audience. But in this case she isn’t at a house party. It is usually very common for the storyline of the video to be based around love, drugs, behaviour etc.We have tried to include many close up shots of our main protagonist as she is an attractive female in the audiences view. This refers to Laura Mulvey's theory of the 'Male Gaze'. It is the concept of how the audience views the people being presented and in this case the way the characters are being viewed by a heterosexual males perspective. 

We constructed a survey for our classmates so that we could get some initial ideas to add to our video. We asked them 10 questions which were:

1. Are you male or female?
2. What is your favourite genre of music?
3. Do you prefer songs with lyrics or instrumental tracks?
4. Are you familiar with the "House" genre?
5. If so, who is your favourite artist with this genre?
6. Do you think music videos are most effective when they are conceptual, narrative or performance based?
7. Are you familiar with the silent film genre?
8. In your opinion, would an entirely black and white video be effective?
9. Do you regularly watch music channels?
10. If so, which three do you watch most often?

We then decided to use the results of the questions which were most relevant to show in the form of bar charts and pie charts. 

 Considering our class is made up of mainly girls in ratio to boys, the answer to this question was always going to be quite obvious.

 When asking if they preferred lyrical tracks or instrumental tracks the feedback was very much towards a songs with lyrics. We felt that to go along with the house genre we would need to find an instrumental track that we could highlight the main points of the music well.

 This was an important question to ask but the feedback was very widely opinionated as the narrative based video just about outnumbered conceptual and performance. All music videos contain at least one of these elements and sometimes even more. But we decided to go with our feedback and make it a narrative based video.

 The majority of our class also thought that an entire black and white video would be effective and this helped us to make our final decision on making our whole music video in black and white. It gave the video the type of feel we were going for initially, as an old black and white film feel to it. So this worked well in our favour.

Most of our classmates were familiar with the House music genre, but for those who were not, we played our selected song track 'Aspirin' By johnny Muse to the class so they could get a feel of the song and capture some of our ideas. 




 The feedback was very helpful as it helped us to determine which ways we wanted to go with our video including the storyline and the editing of it. Of course we wanted to go with our gut instincts but this survey helped us gain an idea of what others thought of our ideas and what we could do or alter to make it better as a whole. 

We also gained feedback from our digipak and magazine advert designs. The feedback collected showed views that our digipak showed the setting very well and that our magazine cover was simple yet effective and straight to the point. They said that it represented the genre well. 


These pictures show first of all a storyboard we made of all the images we thought represented our genre and idea well including aspirin as the song title suggests and also urban settings. 

We also photoshopped an underground sign and deleted the writing from inside and inside of these we had found the underground font to write inside of this sign 'ASPIRIN'. We thought it may be a good idea to present some colour on the covers in contrast with our entirely black and white video. 

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