Evaluation Question 3- What have you learned from audience feedback?

1. What have you learned from your
audience feedback?
Felan Quirke

2. Initial Research+Questionnaire
When carrying out our initial research, Emma and I wanted to distinguish what people looked for in documentaries.
So we created a questionnaire which provided questions for people within our class to answer, we handed the
questionnaire to 10 people to gain more objective and reliable results. The people within our class consisted of
males and females so this meant our results weren’t bias and we gained more broad range of opinions from a
variety of people. Our first question was what genre of documentary do you prefer and nearly half of the people we
asked said, human behaviour. After asking them why they claimed that, “It is more immersive because you gain a
sense of relatability.” This tied in well when coincided with our subject focus; highlighting the abuse elderly people
face within care homes. The genre itself would need to evoke empathy among our audience and because it is a
human based genre, we had to generate a tone of intimacy and make it personal, which aided our intent.
Emma and I wanted to find out what style people enjoyed watching before we began anything else so audience
feedback was essential here as it acted as a starting point for our documentary. Not only the documentary but for
the entire Advanced Portfolio; my advert and DPS. Because it was going to be a human Behaviour documentary this
meant that the DPS and Advert had to visually display a connection to a person and topic.

4. Ancillary task peer feedback
I created many drafts of my ancillary tasks in order to construct the most effective media product, I created
so many drafts on account of my peer/audience feedback being implemented into the creation process. I
was within my media class when working on my ancillary tasks and this allowed me to ask my peers for
feedback. We each lay images of our products throughout the room and we all walked around and left
improvement comments and what went well comments on sticky notes. This allowed me a broader range
of opinions and influenced my creativity, it also allowed me to spot mistakes that I myself couldn’t see.
Consequently, peer feedback was essential when creating my ancillary tasks as it allowed me to create a
more innovative product as I had many different ideas from people in my class.

5. After asking 19 people what
device they like to see in
documentaries half of them said
a voiceover was the most
important. When asked why they
replied, “They explain what’s
going on which makes the
documentary easier to watch.”
This decided that my
documentary would be
informative and adopt an
expository styling that would
include a voiceover to coincide
with the narrative. Again, peer
feedback aided my decision
making process and helped me
to establish what devices were
most prevalent.

6. Here you can see an early draft of my advertisement, after
showing it to my class I received feedback which said that I
needed to implement a darker colour scheme and after
doing this it made me realise that it would continue the
ongoing ominous theme. So peer feedback allowed me to
see my errors and develop upon them.

7. This is an early draft of my DPS, initially I didn’t
intend to include text in the form of an article or
interview I was just going to keep it simple, to
evoke a minimalistic style. However, after
considering my audience I thought it would be
better to include an informative aspect to appeal
to my specific audience, which I discovered would
be people aged between 20-40 with the
psychographic group of aspirers. This is because
my documentary intention is top inspire change
and balance within society. I discovered my
audience because I had given my questionnaires
to people aged from 16-18 which wasn't taking
into account the older generation, when asked if
they liked informative elements to documentaries
and DPS’s they said no. So I realised that the older
generation would probably prefer reading into the
media product more than the younger people. So
in the end I decided to include text.

8. Overall
Feedback from my ancillary tasks was extremely helpful as the advice
allowed me to make useful alterations to my work which resulted In
the final product. I discovered that all three aspects of the coursework
needed to work in tandem in order to promote the media products
correctly.
Ultimately thought, feedback from my actual documentary was most
effective because when I received that I could edit my ancillary tasks
accordingly i.e.. Incorporate a ominous colour scheme, include
informative aspects for my older audience. I also learnt that because I
followed Channel 4 for my institution inspiration I wanted to use the
expository styling because Channel 4 are so popular with their
aspiring audience. The voiceover aspect of this style was also
recommended by the feedback I was given as it would make the
documentary easily perceived.