Evaluation Activity 3

The first pieces of feedback were taken following our pitch to our peers. They liked the name of our band -Perplexa - as they felt it was important to our target audience; 'to perplex' means 'to confuse', so when the target audience was late teens/early 20's, the name Perplexa highlights the confusion of the teenagers in the world, tying in with political matters and the idea that it is hard being a teenager - this was received well with our pitchees. They also approved of our challenging of the convention of flashbacks in our video. As normally flashbacks involve a darker, more abstract effect being applied to them through editing, the idea of changing this in our video to a brighter, lighter effect was met with positive feedback.
My teacher also liked the inspiration we had selected, such as Devlin's 'Community Outcast (for its simplicity, which we particularly tried to emulate) and Eminem's 'Not Afraid' (for the conveyance of its message)
After submitting our draft music video, the feedback received was positive, yet there was much to be improved on. Our teacher advised us to change a number of things, the majority of which we agreed would make a more effective, realistic music video.

We then hosted a 'premiere' of our music video to gain extra feedback from people in our age group who could be possible target audience. We gave each viewer a questionnaire to fill in concerning their music habits and their opinions on the video. A copy of the questionnaire is available below, as well as footage of our premiere, and our reaction to just some of the 45 questionnaires we gave out.


Questionnaire





As you can see, our feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Our video didn't score a rating below 6 out of 10 (mostly 7's and 8's), and the themes we were trying to convey - loneliness in the 'Big City Prison' - were received effectively. Themes of 'emotion', 'loneliness' and 'sadness' were frequently identified by our audience on their questionnaire.
Our audience also accurately said our music video was either part of the Rap, Hip-Hop or R'n'B genres. It is unclear actually which genre it falls solely into (there is some overlap) so we were happy with the above 3 being chosen. It is arguable that our song falls into all 3 genres - the rap part obviously belonging to the rap genre, whilst the sung part is more R'n'B.
Much like what our teacher said, our audience commented on the high standard of Andy's lip syncing and rapping. Several viewers said this was their favourite part of the video; therefore it was good that we acted on our teachers feedback to include more of him.
The good thing which we found from conducting this research is that, whilst the audience we showed it to weren't all necessarily in our target audience (they had varying music tastes) everyone rated it highly. This pleased us as it meant we could 'reach out' and maybe gain some viewers not just from our target audience, but also from outside it. This universal appeal is something all artists try to do, so to feel that we achieved it made us very satisfied. Viewers were also asked which TV music channel they would expect to find our video on. Many replied with MTV and AKA, which pleased us because those channels feature quite well known songs whose target audience is very vast. If our video fits in with this in terms of popularity, we have not only achieved what we set out to do (appeal to a certain target audience) but much more; we have expanded our audience to one that is much bigger and more varied than we expected.