This document discusses the results of a survey conducted to help inform the creation of a student music video. Key findings from the survey include that rock music is most popular amongst the target audience, and that music videos featuring live performance and narrative elements are preferred. The survey also provided insight into incorporating elements of sadness/anger and varying the locations used in the narrative to avoid being confined to one place. Ideas from the students' favorite music video, such as tracking shots, were integrated into the final video.

1. Media Evaluation
Question 3 - Initial Draft

2. These questions help us get a brief outline about
the audience out there, for example the first two
questions can be seen as the least important of
the ten due to them having nothing to do with
music and therefore our product however they aid
us in showing us what age we should be aiming to
appeal to for example if the results came back
showing ninety percent of the audience consisting
of nine year olds it would not be suitable to
produce a heavy metal gothic album as that is not
what would appeal to them and our relationship
with the audience would be very poor to say the
least.

3.  Question 3 and 4 go into more
depth in the sense that they ask to
gain a knowledge of how familiar
the audience we are aiming
towards are with music and music
videos which helps us know if they
would be used to matching visuals
to lyrics and audio as in Andrew
Goodwin’s theory of lyric
illustration. We found from our
results that within the students at
my college that music videos are
quite popular and therefore we
must include many conventions that
other successful music videos use
quite successfully in order to put
forth our product as a believable
and realistic piece of media.

4.  The fifth question allows us to gain
insight into what genre takes up the
majority of the available audience’s
interest, for example if the majority of
the audience chose classical as their
favourite genre of music then we would
know instantly what type of conventions
to place in our video to appeal to the
audience such as classical instruments
and large orchestras however the results
we gained showed rock as the main
runner so therefore we incorporated
many different factors and conventions
to create what is our video today. For
example Rock music videos have a high
featuring of live performance and cuts in
between of narrative. This is exactly
what we have incorporated into our video
as to make it easily recognisable as a
music video in the Rock genre and to
apply to the audience that we are
targeting.
Pop
Rock
Indie
Alternative
Punk
Pop-Punk
Metal
Classical
Grunge
Dance
Folk
R&B
Hip Hop

5. Question 6 helped reinforce some brief knowledge
we gained in question 5 as to which is preferred
between narrative and live performance which to
no surprise showed that live performance is a large
factor in rock videos so it just helped us be sure
that we were doing the right thing by incorporating
a great deal of that into our product alongside
narrative which helps back up the idea that our
video is also about the music that is being played
and not just about trying to tell a narrative over a
few minutes because when it comes down to it the
audience are normally viewing the video for the
music and not the narrative.

6. Question 7 was primarily focused on the theory of star image put forward
by Richard Dyer and Andrew Goodwin, as to the attitudes of the audience
towards the lead singer during live performance sections to be the main
focus of the majority of the shots as to build a star image relationship with
him throughout the video which could help put forth the emotions felt by
the main protagonist and help the audience be placed in his shoes helping
them feel the emotions. This is an idea used in many videos and one I have
recently researched – Cage the Elephant: Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked
which follows a man from a car crash around the desert describing his
experiences whilst trying to collect himself in the blazing desert heat and
it works really well and if we can incorporate any ideas such as them into
our video then it should work really well.

7. Question 8 was a completely open question to the
audience asking what they believed is normally seen
in a music video, we received the obvious such as
‘people playing instruments’ and ‘playing as a band’
however we also received ‘sadness or anger’ which
led us to heavily incorporate the dark theme in our
live performance and the later scenes in our video
that feature a grave yard so it is easy to see that this
question had a large effect on what was in our video,
especially in the performance sections.

8. For 9 we asked what locations you would expect to see in a
music video and just like the previous question, this is an
open question and we didn’t narrow it down to narrative or
performance, we gave the audience chance to give feedback
on both. We got answers such as ‘on a stage’, which appeared
quite a lot, and ‘in a house’ however this wasn’t the most
helpful however there are some scenes in a house so it should
still apply to them, the most helpful answers we got were
those that stated we should not predominantly set our
narrative in one location as they helped us spread out the
narrative across various locations.

9. We finalised our questionnaire with asking what is
the audience’s favourite music video where they got
complete freedom to choose any video they want and
when the video was in the rock video we watched it
and incorporated some features from their video that
made sense when picturing them in our video such as
following the protagonist down streets with the track
and dolly which allowed more advanced shots which
can be seen in many music videos today instead of
plain shots which are simply in one place throughout
which can lead to boring the viewer if they are the
only shots used throughout the video.