This is some audience feedback we gained when we asked some teenagers between the ages of 16 and 17 to watch our music video and then answer some questions about it. We asked teenagers of this age to watch our video as they are within the age of our target audience and will therefore have a good understanding of the concepts explored in the video, such as a relationship between a young man and woman, and they will also have expectations of an indie music video as they have probably seen many of these before.
From the feedback we can see that most of the audience were able to identify the genre of the video as indie with a few people suggesting rock/pop, and so we know that our video must have connoted our chosen genre well.
When asked in what ways did the video meet their expectations of the indie genre we found that some mentioned the location. specifically saying that the location of the band performance was 'grimey' and therefore we knew that they had understood the idea that indie bands usually have locations in their videos that seem quite low-budget rather than a high-budget location such as a studio. A few people also mentioned the 'story line' or narrative, saying that the relationship between the boy and the girl was recognisable to them as typical of the indie genre, this is what we aimed for as many indie videos show relationships between young people, and dilemmas in their relationships such as break ups. One girl also mentioned how the video cut between the narrative and the performance which is also typical of the indie genre. The feedback to this question shows how the audience understood and recognised the conventions of the indie genre within our video that we were aiming to show.
The audience seemed to enjoy the performance element in the video, one girl stating that the band didn't seem to 'care' which reminded her of indie bands, and some seemed to think the performance influenced the story-line. However, there were a couple of comments suggesting that the band were not energetic enough.
The story-line was very well understood by the audience, they all depicted the idea well and as we had planned it, showing that the way we had filmed the video meant the narrative was clearly expressed throughout, and so we were very pleased with this result. The flashbacks were also understood and the audience were able to recognise their meaning within the narrative as representative of the past that the boy was looking back on. Again we were please with this as it meant the flashbacks had been successfully constructed and placed within the video. However, one boy felt that instead of tinting the shots of the flashbacks pink we could have changed them to black and white in order to make the flashbacks clearer. Although this is valid feedback, it had been something we'd thought about, however we'd decided on the pink tint in order to suggest the idea of love and emphasize the loss of the boy's love as the present time lacked the pink tint.
Most of the audience felt that they wouldn't change anything about the video as it was good they way it is. However, one girl mentioned she would like to see the video showing the girl and her thoughts and feelings. This is a good idea, but we had chosen to deliberately restrict the girl's presence to the flashbacks in order to create more of a mystery about her and also leave the audience with an enigma at the end when the boy turns around on the bridge and looks into the camera. One girl mentioned that there was a lot going on in the video and she felt she hadn't heard the words of the song, however, we feel that there is enough going on for the video to not be boring and also we needed many cuts to keep the pace of the video going.
