Evaluation: Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
We have gained feedback in a number of ways for our project. The first way we used was asking people to comment on our YouTube video, and give us their opinions. We have received quite a few responses this way, which has been very useful for this evaluation. However, these responses were all positive, and we also needed some contructive criticism for our video, which we obtained through our questionnaire on SurveyMonkey.com. Another method we attempted to use was by posting it on our Facebook pages, but this did not generate much feedback.
However, before we began our project, we conducted some audience research to discover what people thought about the Coral, and what their expectations were of the band and their genre. Although the Coral are not that well known, due to being an indie band, and therefore not mainstream, we were able to find some fans to complete the survey, and discover more about what people would expect to see when we created our own video. From this survey, we were able to determine that fans would expect to see unusual and confusing images on album covers, and would expect the videos to not follow mainstream codes and conventions. We endeavered to use this feedback when creating our own digipak, by using the image of the bear having removed it's head, and by having a fairly unusual theme throughout our video of the randomly occuring happy events.
When we had completed our video, we uploaded it to YouTube, and asked people to comment on the video to get a feel of what people felt about it straight after viewing it. We were able to ascertain that people tended to be fond of particular elements in the video, particularly those that were ususual, such as the bear dancing at the top of Clifford's tower. It seems that these unusal aspects boost people's opinions of the video, and make them like the video more.

In order to gain further feedback, we created a SurveyMonkey.com questionnaire, which was posted alongside the video on YouTube, which asked four questions about the video. This did not gain as much feedback as the video, only generating thre mostly positive responses. However, one response did give critical comments of the video, especially regarding the editing. Some of the changes suggested would not be possible however, and one person completing the survey respected this, when pointing out the song was too short, also added that we would be unable to change the length of this.

This is the feedback we received on SurveyMonkey

http://www.surveymonkey.com/?cmpid=eng:gb:ps:google

Link to SurveyMonkey, where questionnaires consisting of ten or fewer questions can be created for free

I also posted the video on my blog, and received a couple of comments this way, which helped add to our feedback. From our feedback, although limited, we have discovered that viewers think the video is interesting and engaging, and have a generally positive thoughts to give. However, the feedback has allowed us to identify on areas we could improve, such as the editing, but the majority of the improvements suggested would be ideal, but not possible with the resources we have access to.

Most of our feedback has been gathered online, from people we do not know, and this has led to us concluding a number of things. We have a received a very large proportion of positive feedback, and we have concluded that this is probably due to the fact that people recognise it is a group of students' music video, so are less likely to be critical. However, a lot of the time, when looking at comments on other music videos it is possible to see that although people give their opinions, this does not give an idea, of whether this is what to expect of a video, unless it largely differs from conventions.

We can also see, and this is especially prevalent on our Facebook pages where our friends comment, that people who know you are likely to give positive feedback, but not give information on why it gives them such a positive outlook on the video, and this feedback may just be due to the fact that they want to praise their friends' work.