Question 3: what have you learned from your

audience feedback?I have learned…

Originally my desired reading for the song was…

• The singer, Julian was portraying Ben Austin. He was a young man who was in love with Abby, played by Sophie.

• As producer, the desired reading (theorized by Hall) would be, the love was equally reciprocated by both.

• The music video narrative would be concept based. That concept would be love. Therefore, I had idea to show both Ben and Abby’s romantic gestures towards each other throughout the music video.

However…

•I organized a target audience research, focus group to test whether the group of 16 to 18 year olds had the same readings of the song that I did.

Halls ‘desired reading’…

• Hall suggests that the producer of a music video is responsible for coding a specific message (desired reading) into the narrative. Therefore, the audience will decode and understand the narrative the way I desired them to.

• However, our target audience suggested a negotiated reading during their participation in the focus group.

The target audience focus group…

My partner and I sat at the head of the table and played small sections of the song to the focus group. For example, we played the line of the chorus ‘And maybe I’m just in love when you wake me up’. The focus group had an oppositional reading of this line compared to our desired reading. They suggested that the lyrics could mean, the singer had idealized the relationship. Therefore, the focus group believed that as the narrative progressed, issues in the relationship should be gradually highlighted to the viewer.

How did this help us?

This oppositional reading was extremely useful. I had not thought of this idea previous to the Ta focus group and it resulted in our narrative being much more interesting. For example we could now apply Todorov’s theory of equilibrium. E.g. the relationship was seemingly happy and then a problem arises (Abby becoming gradually more disinterested in Ben). Finally, the characters finds a new equilibrium.

…• I was making the music video for a young target audience, therefore

I wanted to ask them whether they preferred to be a passive viewer or become an active audience because I was uncertain as to what the majority of the younger people wanted from a music video.

• They seemed to react positively to the idea of occasional signs and signifiers (e.g. Barthes) and therefore we decided to include these in the music video. Most significantly, superimposing a CCTV camera above the head of Abby while she looked at it disapprovingly to symbolize her resentment of Ben for being too possessive of her.

Upon reflection…

• The use of superimposition to symbolize ‘being watched’ by a possessive boyfriend may be considered a confusing concept for a young target audience. I was concerned that they may not understand the connotations, or make any effort to understand.

• Therefore, it would have been useful to create another focus group. In order to show them this part of the music video and ask them what they thought the desired reading is.

I would have liked to use more focus groups during my research and also construction.

• Because I think it would have been useful to ask them if they liked very specific features of my music video or my ideas for the music video. • It would have been useful to ask the same focus

group if my music video was what they imagined when they heard the song.

We also created paper questionnaires for our target audience to complete.

The majority of my target audience stated that they prefer that about half of the music video features the main star. This was useful information as I was unsure whether to feature my star in more, or less than half of the video. This research highlighted to me that I needed to equally balance the narrative with the singing into camera.

Question 4 …The majority of our target audience said that they did not buy physical copies of a CD and if they did it was the CD’s of well established artists that they were fans of. Taking this into account, I decided to use sell lines like ‘pre – order now from iTunes’ on my digipak advert because the majority of the young generation download and stream their music.

…

Question 5…

The majority of the target audience also suggested that the use of social media was useful in launching a new artist therefore we created a twitter page for our star and made sure to include links to follow him on twitter on our digipak advert.

Ben Austin’s Twitter page!

Hopefully this use of social media would appeal to a younger target audience and Ben Austin will begin to develop a fan base.

He can also promote the digipak and music video from Twitter.

Question 6…

From this question we learned that the majority of our target audience thought that a digipak advert/poster should have duller colours and tones.

We included duller tones on our digipak advert to comply with the wishes of our TA.

We used black font as well as choosing to dress the model, Julian in a black hoody. The background is also very monotone. The use of darker, winter type colours is a common convention of the Pop Acoustic genre.