WS - Role of Feedback

With any media product feedback is essential to make sure it is the best it possibly can be and to ensure that it is suitable for the target audience. It also increases the chance that any mistakes will be picked up on and gives an unbiased opinion on how the product can be improved. It is also beneficial in that it gives you increased options in what to do, as you receive new ideas but you don't have to use them.

There are an increasing number of ways to receive feedback on media products due to the advances in technology and digitisation. We are fortunate that our primary target audience is 15-24 as this allows us to get feedback from our fellow class members very simply. They are also in a similar position in trying to make their own videos and so understand the issues involved, what is realistic and what is out of range for what we can achieve. With a combination of males and females in the class we received feedback from both genders on our work. The age of this feedback group was 17 or 18 so quite in the middle of our primary target audience meaning we got a balance between the younger end of the range, but also some insights into how the older and more mature people of our Target Audience may respond. This was our main source of feedback.

To get our work out to a wider audience we also made use of the advancing technology and equipment/websites that were available to us. The main one of these was YouTube where all of our sample scenes/rough cuts were posted. This allowed a wider range of people to view our work, both fellow students from other schools doing similar courses and general people who may be interested. By using the tag tool on YouTube we also increased the chances of the work being seen by people searching for the song, band or anything connected with our video by the tags that we included when uploading. This method of receiving feedback also led to us getting valuable feedback from a past student who went through this process last year.

Early in the course shortly after forming our group we created a Facebook and Twitter page so that people could "like" or "Follow" to keep up with any updates we wanted to give out. We took advantage of these by posting sample scenes or rough cuts early in the production process to allow any fans to see what we were doing and how our sample footage was coming on. By posting them we gave fans the opportunity to feedback and give any advice they felt might help us. This allowed us to request feedback from a wider target audience extending, unlike the class feedback, to our secondary target audience. This was also the case with the feedback on You Tube.