Media Coursework

2. Introduction
We believed that collecting audience feedback at several stages
throughout the coursework would help us directly address our
target audience. We did this in lots of different ways, including
qualitative one-to-one interviews as well as quantitative surveys.
All this information was invaluable when trying to create products
that would attract a specific group. Our target audience is mainly
males between the ages of 16 and 24, however within the last few
years, there has been an increase in a female audience which we
tried to cater for. This age demographic gave us a lot of
opportunity to reference popular culture as well as heavily
integrate social media.

3. Individual Interviews
The first audience feedback we tried to gain was interviews with individuals who fit within our
age demographic. Choosing the audience close to our own age group allowed us to have good
access to our audience due to the students within our college staying within the age group. We
tried to interview individuals from several different cultural backgrounds to gain broad
understanding of what was expected. This was a rewarding activity and we got lots of useful
information which we put towards our products. Due to the slight differences between the
answers, we were able to join these ideas together to try and create the best product. When
looking around for people to interview, many people decided they didn’t want to be interviewed
due the fact that they didn’t know much about the indie genre, which gave us the impression that
the audience for Indie Rock was still quite niche. When discussing colours, we found that there
were strong similarities between what people said, mainly the colour black joined with one other
brighter colour such as “black and red” or “black and purple”. A stand-out answer to all these
others we were given was when someone answered that “probably nothing” would persuade
them to buy a digi-pack. This gave us a very strong impression that the age group we were trying
to target had almost completely gone digital, and so we wanted if possible, to create a strong link
between our digi-pack and website.

4. Surveys
Our survey created on surveymonkey.com gave a large amount of useful information which we
included in our final products. It was from this that we really started to understand the
importance of using certain techniques and products to target our audience due to the large
majority of those who to the survey choosing the same options. This was most obvious in the
features that our audience would like to find on the website. Social Media was chosen by all of
those who took the survey, as well as tour dates. Because of this we decided that we would need
to put large buttons leading to popular social networking sites at the top of the site, and a page
which was specifically devoted to the band’s upcoming tour dates. We made these large and very
clear so there would be no misunderstanding. Our question about our digi-pack also brought up
some interesting points that we were able to answer. It was made clear to us that the band name
should be very clear and appear on the front cover, while our track list should also be clear. Many
thought it was also important to include the record label, and so we made sure this was carried
through into our final product. Personally, I think if we had asked a larger number of questions we
could have gained an even greater understanding of what would attract our target audience. If
we were to complete the coursework again I would create an survey for each product with
questions which went into more depth about actual examples of pictures and camera shots etc.

5. Pitch to class
When we got close to half way through the coursework we presented our ideas that we had put
together to our class to try gain feedback about what could be changed or improved. This was a
rewarding activity and allowed us to come to terms with what was actually possible and what we
were trying to achieve. We had been thinking to use a smoke machine to cover up the cuts in our
video to achieve the single shot effect that we had seen in the Foo Fighters video “My Hero”.
However after getting feedback from our class we realised that this was going to be extremely
hard to pull off, especially with our lack of experience trying such things. Because of this we
decided to scale down our ambitions to create a product would be more simple to create but
hopefully would be to a higher standard. Carrying on with our initial idea would have caused us
several problems in production which we hadn’t considered at at first, such as the fact that the
house that we ended up filming didn’t have any corridors, and the smoke created from a smoke
machine wouldn’t be dense enough to cover up a cut. Moving all our guitar equipment and drum
set may have also looked like a string of continuity errors rather than giving the effect of the band
moving seamlessly from one room to another. Many of those giving us feedback were within our
age bracket and also were fans of Indie Rock, fitting into our target audience. Their feedback was
especially useful and many had knowledge about the Indie Genre which gave us further
inspiration.

6. Individual feedback on drafts
The final piece of feedback we received was on the drafts that we had created. At this point we
had a rough cut of our music video as well as our digipack and website. We were happy with the
progress we had made but tried to separate ourselves from the products, trying to justify all we
had done against the feedback we had received at the different points through our coursework.
We also showed our products to fellow media students working on the same coursework, hoping
that they would be able to provide more in depth analysis and help us relate the products back to
our brand identity and genre. It was at this point that we realised that our digi-pack was split into
two halves, and didn’t really work together as one product. We were told this by several
individuals and decided that it needed to be addressed as soon as possible. We decided to get rid
of the panels using the long exposure effect and instead use more images using colour splash,
believing this would target our audience further. Also, our album name “fingerprints” didn’t seem
to relate to any of the other work we had done, and so we decided to relate this directly to the
digipack and the album name was changed to “flash of colour”.