What have you learned from your audience feedback?Ben Devenish

Throughout the development of our 3 products audience feedback has been essential. Getting feedback from the target audience is important so that we know that we are on the right tracks to creating a brand that the audience can enjoy. Therefore getting them involved in different stages of production/ development of the products was vital. Even getting feedback from audience members outside our target bracket was important to see if we could create an interesting product for those who might not have been directly targeting.

Audience feedback also helped us to sort out disputes in the group where we couldn’t actually come up with an idea (as was influential with the gang name) or helping to resolve issues we couldn’t agree with in the group, because of divided opinions.

One of the most important reasons for using audience feedback was to improve draft copies of or 3 product. If a strong percentage of the audience didn’t like something in 1 of our 3 products we then used this information to go and improve the product, hence learning a valuable opinion of the audience.

General lessons learnt from audience feedback

Names

JakeTyroneRossBrandonLiam Jason

One of the first times we used audience feedback was helping to choose the name. We had come up with the names in the group internally and got the audience involved because we all had different preferences in the group, so a majority vote would decide the name. Doing this also enabled us to get the audiences point of view on the names, certain audience members giving reasons for why they preferred names. Such opinions stated that they felt names like Brandon (The eventual winner) was masculine and had a street feel to it. This enabled us to learn the importance of audience feedback, knowing we could rely on it later and also helped us move on swiftly to more important stages of production.

Gang name

KingsideSoulcrewZulus Black PantherThird Street Saints

Audience feedback was vital in establishing the gang name. The eventual winner Third Street Saints was actually decided by an audience member who had heard the name from a game. This was an important lesson because we’d been struggling for ideas and knew from this experience that we could use the audience to actually come up with ideas. After the survey we adapted the name of the gang to Ninth Street saints, so that it differed from the game gang name. After this we were also quickly able to establish the film name “Ninth Street Anarchy” which although we had created in the group had been inspired by the original audience member who gave us the gang name.

Ninth Street saintsUrban JungleTopSideDarkest Hour

Film nameAs stated in the previous slide “Ninth Street Anarchy” was the name that the group wanted for the film, because of the link to the gang name we had just established. However we still felt that it was important to put the potential film name in a test against a couple of other ideas the group had. Fortunately for the group Ninth Street Anarchy came out on top in the audience feedback. We did the test because it helped to establish that the audience felt that we were on the right track to creating a product they could potentially enjoy.

Logo

Similar with the film title, the group had personal preferences for the production company logo (Middle) but we still felt that it was important to put the logos created to an audience survey. One of the reasons for this is that we felt that all of the logos were incomplete and needed some improving, therefore using audience feedback we could establish which was the best logo and then go on to improve that logo instead of wasting time trying to make all 3 perfect.

Demographics surveyHelped establish what our potential target audience would like to see.

Demographics survey

Our demographics survey was complete to see what our target audience would normally expect from an action film/ their personal preferences. This included what our audience would expect from an action film main protagonist and what they like to see in action film e.g Violence. This slightly impacted the way in which we actually filmed our trailer, certain aspect from the survey like character physical couldn’t be worked with because of time limits but we could incorporate fight scenes that portray Jake as a strong fighter and being a mysterious character. The question asking about the audiences favourite action movie was to see if we conform to any of these films. However this was difficult because most of the chosen films were purely action, not incorporating the drama genre.

Class Audience feedback on first trailer

CharlieAmyShope Amber

Each group member worked with another media student in our class to gather some feedback on our first draft trailer. One of the important things about having a media student evaluate the trailer is that they were able to pick out small errors in camera work etc. That non-media students may have not been able to pick out. The feedback was generally similar between the 4 different audience members which meant we learnt some of the positives already incorporated in our trailer but more importantly we learned that the trailer needed a lot of work and found some exact issues that needed sorting. For example lots of clips were missing and the story was difficult to follow. This constructive criticism allowed us to really focus on improving the most important product in our brand.

Poster Audience feedback

Poster Audience feedbackBen Devenish, Alex Burton and Jake Ambrose had created 3 posters that had some similarities but also had some key differences, some of the differences included text, colour, text blur and also the shadow we used against the wall. Since we all preferred our own products we put them to audience feedback testing to see what the audience liked about the products. Using this feedback we were actually able to put together one product by drawing strengths from the individual products and removing the weaknesses. This created a product that all the group liked and more importantly met the criteria the audience expected from an action- drama poster. This is similar to the situation we had with the logo feedback, where we have a few ideas and use the audience to help resolve disagreements and move on in creating one group led product instead of 3 individual products.

Magazine Audience feedback

Magazine Audience feedback

Similar to the poster Jake, Devenish and Alex had created lots of different drafts but all of them lacked quality before we came together as a group and tried working on the magazine together. We ended up with the product you can see on the previous slide, however we felt that this product still lacked quality and turned to audience feedback to learn what they felt was good about the product, bad and also what we could add to it. From the audience feedback we knew that there was some positives such as the image used, and how it established brand identity and some of the negatives for example the audience didn’t like the text block with the top 10 movies and they felt like we needed something imprinted against the wall behind Jake. From this we came together as a group, looking into similar products before finally perfecting the magazine for hand in. We were confused before this audience feedback, which made it important because it helped clear up the good and bad things about our product, giving us a clear direction on what needed improving.