What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For my media production I staged two focus groups were my audience would give me positive and negative feedback. Firstly this would help us plan the rest of our production and guide us down the correct root in which are audience were swaying to. Once we had completed our finial video we help another screening this is where we received their finial feedback and their understanding of the finished product. We also handed out in our final screening a questionnaire (as seen on blog) to find correlations between social stratifications which would determine their reaction to the music video.
On our first screening we showed a selected audience what we had produced so far, the results we received where useful and interesting and swung how we intended to create our final product. Feedback –
Ciara - "I am enjoying the start of your music video, but i am finding it difficult to understand the story line. I also feel the performance and narrative need to be shown as two different things, this could be done though editing?"
Emily - "I really like your mise-en scene, and how you have managed to create this folk theme to your music video"
James - "i find the actor interesting he is a good looking guy and confident i feel he really helps this music video shape what it is, maybe using more of him in the performance roll would be needed?"
From this feedback we re-thought our editing techniques and put our self in the decoders position this helped us understand what messages people where taking from the video and how we as encoders can create the meaning in a simple manner.
Secondly after we had completed our music video we screened it to a new audience and asked them to fill out a questionnaire (can be found on blog) the idea of the questionnaire was to find out the correlations between social stratification (age, gender, lifestyles ect) and reaction to the video. Some of the questions where constructed in such a way as to attempt to operationalise the Encoding and Decoding model. I found through my questionnaire the older generation did not fully understand the message being portrayed through the song and video due to moral values, but the younger generation were more knowledgeable and could relate to storylines seen in other medias, such a TV soaps and movies. Considering the all the signs portrayed through my music video they are seen as polysemic and people react to media texts in different and sometimes unpredictable ways. I feel the readings we took from our audience could of been influenced, this can be explained through the use and gratifications model, the setting in which the video was watch with a questionnaire laid out in front of the is very different to the conditions they would normally be watched in, this may have changed the typical gratification a person might taken when watching this video. Here are the negative and positives gained from the second screening.
The negatives - teacher 1-" i found the fast cutting scenes to be a little confusing to start with and did not understand the need to show a clock within the video. I also noticed the in one scene the girl was wearing tights and the next she was not"
The positive - Max age 16 - I really enjoyed the video, i found it exciting and i really felt i got pulled into the story."
Teacher 2 - "i found the editing of the video was really key in creating a visually interesting video, and keeping your audience attached. I can see this video appealing to people my age and the younger generation."
On an overview of my audiences feedback I have gained a knowledge of how effective it is to hold these focus groups and how it can push your project in the right direction. I would in future hold more when creating something as they are useful and supply you with knowledge to help you succeed.