After I completed my music video, one important and fundamental thing to do was to show my finished product to an audience and receive their constructive criticism and feedback. I presented my music video to a group of about 200 16-18 year old students, therefore not only is this the target audience age group of This Providence, but being a late teenager, means they are media literate and in touch with lots of platforms of media and will naturally view various music videos and listen to music pretty much all the time. I created a questionnaire before playing my music video to the large audience; it consisted of 7 simple tick questions with one concluding question asking for any other comments or feedback.
After my music video was shown, I collected back the questionnaires and recorded the results in a pie chart, as this presents easy viewing as to what was the most popular answer. Click this link below to view the results:
Although the majority of the votes prove successful and show that the majority of people enjoyed my music video and understood the narrative clearly and the representation was evident. However, there were a few votes that were against certain aspects of my music video, such as they disagreed any representation of youth, relationship or fashion was present in my work, even though most of the signifiers were pretty obvious, and that also I didn’t use many shots, even though I used 20 different types of camera shots and camera movements. The only reason I can think I had this response is perhaps those few people weren’t viewing my music video intently, or they were just a little ignorant and rushed the questionnaire with no thought. As I did receive immature comments too, which prove that for some people my questionnaire wasn’t taken seriously. And since these results accounted for 3 or 4 people out of 200, these can’t really be taken into consideration. However, I have learnt a lot from my questionnaire and the set of results. I have learnt that I perhaps should’ve chosen a better casting, who were used to acting and used to being in front of a camera, as perhaps using the average person doesn’t quite get across the point of the music video with enough passion and meaning. I have also learnt that I should try to find cast members that have a completely free schedule when I will be filming, therefore I could’ve stuck with my original plan to have a full band performance, and I feel this would’ve worked a lot more effectively in the music video. I also think I should’ve included more close-up shots of different fashion garments to represent youthful fashion a little more, as I don’t think the audience fully picked up on this. On the first chorus of the song, I feel I used fast shots to match the beat of the song adequately, but I didn’t follow this up on the second chorus as I used quite slow-motion clips, so this may not have matched the progression and pace of the song, and I have learnt from this that fitting the shots with the beat of the song is very important. Also, I had a couple of comments on how the friendship scenes looked quite ‘forced’, therefore I should’ve perhaps not had a script for set movements they had to perform, I should’ve just recorded clips from a natural environment, doing friend activities and added those in instead, so it didn’t look as ‘scripted’.
I have also learnt that 16-year-old girl’s liked my music video a lot more than males and 18 year old’s. This suggests that the relationship/friendship/fashion side of the music video is quite female orientated and aimed, even though it is a 4 piece male Rock band originally producing the song, and there is an equal split between female and male fans. Perhaps being a girl myself, I made the music video a little too sugar sweet, and perhaps this is where the criticism came from. So if I was to re-create my music video again, I would make sure I featured more rocky male shots including the band performing with their instruments, to interest a male audience along with the females already.
Chelsey's A2 Media Studies Blog 