What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

When creating a media product it is essential to consider the piece from the audiences view, making feedback a crucial part of the process. It tells us a lot about the audiences perspective on the piece. We gathered this information in various ways, using verbal feedback, youtube comments and a survey given to other media students in our school.  This gives us both an idea of the perspective of the general public and also from students who are aware of the kinds of features and conventions to look out for in successful media products. We discovered the worth of audience feedback in our AS coursework, when we used surveying to find out information such as what the title should be and to explore the most appealing plot elements, we used surveymonkey.com to engage with people over the internet.

We decided that we should involve the target audience (15+) from the outset of the drafting process, using a verbal focus group to ask about what they elements they enjoyed most about teaser trailers. We found on a large scale that fast paced trailers were most popular It was also clear that despite the audience wanting to understand what genre they were watching and a general idea of what it entailed, it was vital to not give away the whole plot. We asked the focus group what kind of themes they thought made for an exciting and appealing plot and we learnt that the majority of answers included violence, money, sex and drugs. So this was definitely something we carefully considered when storyboarding initially for our piece and consolidating the plot. By asking the group for examples of their favourite urban drama films and trailers, we were then able to de-construct them and find the reoccurring components, which made them successful, this aided us in our research. We found films such as adulthood and 4.3.2.1 to have the most popular trailers. Through our further research we found that what people found so exciting about modern urban drama, was the sense of 'survival of the fittest' which was often portrayed through the media texts. This influenced us in the plot content and character development for our piece greatly.


Our questionnaire was given to media students completing their AS level Media, although this isn't an appropriate representation of all the people who will see the film, it gave us a more informed idea of what could be improved from a source which could identify the right kind of key aspects which could help us to achieve a higher quality in our product. We asked them to watch the trailer twice through before answering each question, we did this after we had finished creating the piece so that we were able to make informed changes before submission.

The results from this questionnaire found that the genre was very clear to the audience, signifying that the conventions closely follows those appropriate to the urban drama genre. Comments made by the participants such as "Due to location and non-diegetic sound" suggested that we had conformed closely enough to the kinds of features which clearly signify the genre. It was helpful to know that the genre came across effectively.

The results told us that although the tracks we used were fitting to our genre and created the right atmosphere, at certain points the sound could have reached more of a climax to help build necessary tension in order for the plot to be effectively presented. 

To respond to this feedback, we made a lot of changes concerning the order of shots against the non-diegetic sound. Making sound improvements was challenging as the footage was edited against the sound previously, so it proved difficult to move pieces of sound around without obstructing the footage order. 

Another problem we had with sound was that the audience sample reported that the diegetic sound often sounded muffled against the non-diegetic rap music. This was easily improved using final cut pro features to differentiate between the sounds.

The survey result also encouraged us to use more post production effects, as these were popular with the audience sample and by putting more in we would be more consistent in the conventions we were creating for ourselves. We decided after seeing this that we could use more black and white shots and more flash/zoom effects within the piece. (click here to see how we did this).

We had to consider all of the feedback carefully as we knew that it would vary greatly between different groups of people, this was especially clear in the answers to one of the questions asking them to state which feature of the film was. The answers given were spread across all of the options. 

This highlighted the importance of meeting all of their needs in terms of genre clarity and structure with hints of the plot but also to show variety and surprises throughout to reach all kinds of people as part of an audience. 

(click here for survey monkey)