The document summarizes research the author conducted to inform the creation of a music video. They used SurveyMonkey to gather worldwide feedback on audience preferences. They also had people describe images that came to mind while listening to the song to understand common themes. This synesthesia research helped with narrative and visual ideas. Feedback was also gathered in person and influenced design choices for the album artwork and website. After finishing, the author screened the video and collected qualitative data from a questionnaire and discussion to evaluate the final product.
2. Pre-production Audience Research
Before I started my Music Video I had to do prior research in order to record what constituent features
of a music video my target audience preferred. I Chose to present this research onto a SurveyMonkey in
order to gain worldwide feedback from my questionnaire. SurveyMonkey was a really valuable tool in
my research as it had the strengths of reaching a wide scale audience through me posting a link to it on
my Facebook, Twitter and Email it to a variety of people. The Website was really easy to follow and
would allow me to constantly check up on my research and present my findings onto data formats; to
make it easy to identify; for example which answer was mostly chosen. I varied to the choice of answers
and had some open ended questions to allow the person to explain what they have written, however I
also used closed ended multiple choice questions for those people who were in a rush to answer the
question.
3. Synestheasia Research
Theorist Andrew Goodwin explores how listeners as well as composers ‘see’ images when music
is heard. This concept is called Synestheasia. I used this form of research for my music video
research by playing my song to a variety of people and videoing their response to the song and
what images popped up into their head as they were listening. Through videoing the response
whilst they were listening it didn’t give them time to think they just said there and then what
they thought which made the research clearer. From the responses I learnt that the audience
captured in their minds the typical style’s the genre Indie Pop uses in their real media products.
This was for example a soloist playing the guitar, some elaborated and suggested he would be
deserted in a field. Another suggesting was that a boy was being lifted by an angel, this is idea
was great however not very practical. Lastly there was many different opinions as to whether
the narrative was about a boyfriend and girl friend or friends. All these answers were incredibly
useful in creating the product.
4. How my audience research affected the making of my Digipak and Website Page…
Throughout the process of creating the digipak and website I asked peers verbally these
following questions:
• Whether the digipak should stick to the black and white colour to add emotion?
•Whether it matters that I do not have the narrative storyline images on the digipak?
The audience research on the images I created help to know what my target audience
would like to see if they saw the CD on the shelf in a store. The feedback from the research
was definitely beneficial because I got repeatedly told by a lot of people to keep relating
my digipak to the genre my song represented which is why I resulted in having the images
in black and white to reference the emotion the song captures, and the simplicity of the
genre of music.
When the audience influenced me to create the black and white theme throughout my
digipak it meant that I would also have to apply these changes onto my website page to
link the ancillary texts; therefore I made the backdrop a picture of Yaron with his guitar and
saturated it and made it black and white. However I linked the the image colour of the
ancillary but failed to link the font style which was a regret of mine.
When showing my digipak to an audience after having created it I often got told that they
didn’t understand why the Artist’s name was not at the front like it would be for a real
media product. If this feedback was given prior to the finished the product I probably
would have changed it however there were a fair share of people whom didn’t notice
because the song title was presented.
5. Post production Research…
Whilst constructing my post production research, I decided I wanted the results to be
mainly qualitative data to capture the answer and let people elaborate on what they
answer in order to get more reliable data. I created my questionnaire on Microsoft Word
and printed out multiple copy’s for my peers. Melody and I hung up posters promoting
our viewing and wrote at what time and where the premiere viewing of our video would
be. We received a large amount of friends to come and watch our viewing. I let the
audience watch the video before handing out the questionnaire as I did not want them
reading the questions to look out for the answer, as that would make my data unreliable.
After they had answered the questions silently on their own, I conducted a discussion of
the video to hear from the audience comments they had that they might not be able to
put down on paper. This was really interesting and I found out that some people thought
it was infact the dead mother who was the angel. Majority thoroughly enjoyed the video.
Some people did not like the song very much but admitted it was not the genre they are
used to listening too.