3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From our initial audience research we found that from a metalcore video they expected to see a lot of fast paced editing and a range of shots with close ups and midshots the most popular. Also they expected the narrative to be quite abstract and have a dark mis en scene whilst not telling a full story and be in a non-linear structure. We interviewed both male and female participants of different ages to get a larger demographic and more ideas to work with. We also presented our song and filming ideas to the class and got positive feedback with our performance and narrative ideas which was quite surprising as the metalcore genre is not as popular in our class. After our promo was edited and finalised we asked ten participants, both male and female and of different music tastes, to watch our music promo and answer a short questionnaire. The questions covered areas that participants liked as well as certain aspects that could have been improved. We received mostly positive feedback but with constructive criticism that we agreed with. Many of the participants enjoyed the promo, ‘Even though I’m not a fan of the genre I thought the video was exciting and upbeat.’ Many people found that the lighting was the highlight of the promo with responses such as ‘The lighting was really effective and made the whole thing seem more sinister.’ ‘The lights you have set up looks really cool and make the band performing in front of them look awesome.’ However some people felt that the location could have been improved, ‘Although the lighting looks good, the location is quite simple and doesn’t really fit the genre.’ Others thought that ‘there should have been more close ups on the instruments as there weren’t that many.’ The participants all thought that the ratio of the performance and narrative was equal, ‘the performance and narrative work together well and seem equal throughout the video’, ‘the narrative does well to break the performance up and keep it exciting.’ Some of the participants enjoyed the narrative, ‘it was original and didn’t really make sense which fits the metalcore genre.’ ‘The effects in the narrative worked really well and it is different from what I’ve seen in a metalcore promo before.’ On the other hand people thought ‘the narrative didn’t make sense and I couldn’t really understand what was going on,’ ‘the effects looked good but it didn’t really flow and didn’t have a good ending.’ For the final question, many of the participants thought that the promo had replay value, ‘I thought the video was really exciting and both the narrative and performance were well filmed.’ Some participants didn’t agree, ‘I am not a fan of the metalcore genre and watching this video hasn’t changed that.’ From this feedback we feel happy with the promo we created; the video fits in well with the metalcore genre and the lighting that we used seems to be very well received. The narrative also seems to be well liked which is something we are pleased with as we wanted to be original with the idea but also still fit in with the genre. The improvements that we were given are something that we agree with as well, the location could have been more sinister and conventional but this would have been hard to achieve as we needed electricity for the lighting. The metalcore genre isn’t very popular and we knew this when making the promo so obviously some people will not like it as they don’t listen to the music, but overall as a group we are extremely pleased with how our music promo was received.