Audience Feedback

This blogpost was written by my teammate, Beatrice and discusses the constructive feedback we have gotten from those who previewed our video during its development.

The purpose of this screen test is to gain audience feedback about our work and see if there are any improvements that can be made. We decided to use Google Forms to create a survey to share with our audience because we find it convenient and easy to use. We divided the Google Forms into two. The first form is for our music video, while the second form is for our social media and digipak.

Here is the link to the Google Form incase of any technical difficulties → Music Video , Social Media & Digipak

Here are our questions that we made as a team : 

Music Video 

Social Media

Digipak

For the music video, we chose these questions because we want to make sure that our music video effectively resonates with our target audience (teenagers and young adults), and accurately represents the theme of graduating from high school. We also want to assess how well the artist’s persona come across in the music video. For the social media, we want to determine the level of engagement that our target audience prefer, such as whether "fans" want direct interactions or a more curated presence of the star. As for the digipak, we want to make sure that the album cover appeals visually to our target audience and aligns with their aesthetic preferences. Hence, we included images of the digipak's sketch. Overall, we want to make sure that our social media strategy and digipak design align with our target audience’s preferences.

We included members of our target demographic in the screen test to ensure that the feedback we receive is appropriate. Finding people for the screen test was a little difficult because we were told to ask for feedbacks from people who are not taking media studies, which made it quite difficult to find some people who were willingly to respond and able to provide meaningful feedback, as we wanted to ensure that the responses were collected in an appropriate and constructive manner.

Here are the drafts that we showed audiences for the screen test:

MV Draft Link (Music Video Draft)

(Digipak Sketch by Jasmine)

Here are the results from the audience feedback:

Music Video

Social Media 

Digipak 

From the feedback we learned that while most aspects were well-received, there are still areas that need improvement, particularly in the music video. According to Steve Neale's Genre theory, a media text must conform to the conventions enough to be recognizable, yet subvert enough to be different and interesting. However, after reviewing the feedback, we realized that our music video largely adheres to conventions without challenging them, which made it feel monotonous or less engaging for our target audience. Despite this, the responses suggest that we were successful in representing the star’s persona, as the three words used to describe them aligned with our intended portrayal. Furthermore, we gained insights into how to refine the social media and digipak to better appeal to our target audience, and what elements we need to include in it.

While we can't really incorporate certain suggested elements from the responses (such as graduation caps, gowns, or younger actresses resembling our stars) due to accessibility constraints, the audience feedback remains invaluable in refining our music video. Specifically, we can still use the feedback to improve some areas, such as enhancing the authenticity of performance, ensuring that the lip-syncing and acting feel more natural, and adding more emotional scenes to strengthen the narrative reinforcing the idea that "the stars are graduating and truly leaving this time." This adjustment not only enhances audience relatability but also prevents the video from feeling visually repetitive and monotone, as it adds emotional depth. The screen test has been an important part of our production process, because it allows us to identify areas for improvement and gain insight into what resonates with our target demographic. By implementing these suggestions, we can create a more engaging and compelling final product. 

Self-Reflection:

I helped out in coming up with some of the questions in the Google forms as my teammates and I discussed together to make them! In addition, I was the one who created the potential album cover sketches on my drawing app, Procreate! I think that the feedback we received from this form was actually very useful, especially since I was on editing duty, so it gave me ideas on what I could’ve improved on. One of the feedbacks mentioned that the MV was a bit boring, and that may have been because some of the scenes were dragged out a bit too long. To solve this, I decided to record more clips to shorten some of the long clips so that the MV would be more engaging instead of being too static, staying in one scene for too long at a time. It is actually also important to mention that after the feedback form, we decided that the album cover would shift from being mainly school themed, to being more neutral towards other themes as we realized that the album cover would be for an entire album, not just Birds of a feather, therefore we wanted an album cover which would apply for most of the other songs.