Evaluation: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To gather the audience feedback required for my evaluation of my music video, I used social networking to my advantage. I sent out a mass email asking for constructive criticism, positive and negative feedback, and a link to the actual video on youtube.

The feedback I received was very useful in telling me what worked well and faults that could have been addressed or improved:

Genrally I had positive feedback. It appealed to the wider audience, and successfully communicated the genre and themes. However through the feedback some of the viewers did point out some opportunities for improvement. Some pointed out specific faults and errors in the video, misplacement of mise en scene, including props and slight costume changes among shots. This occurred because of the filming schedule. We had to make sure that the conditions of weather were the same for continuity purposes. This meant it was important to film when ever we could to ensure this continuity. However, filming on different days did make the risks larger when dealing with smaller, more specific continuity errors. Being picked out by the audience expresses the importance of continuity and the improve this in future productions, I would carefully study the shots and list all possible changes to watch out for. This in depth analysis of the shots would prevent the risk of continuity errors in my film.

The narrative and theatrical structure within the piece was successfully recognised by the audience. I received many other positive comments expressing the structure of the story and how well that linked to the genre. Other genre characteristics were also successfully communicated to the audience, and were recognised as being Gothic attributes.
A common comment was containing the costume and more specifically 'the masks'. The reasons for the masks were clearly communicated to the audience, to maintain the horror within the Gothic genre, an essential theme within the narrative. They successfully gathered my intended audience reaction, and were obviously seen as frightening and surreal making them even more effective as a way to convey the sub-genre.

The most common compliment I received was on the 'hillside silhouette' shots, personally my most impressive shot. The reason the shot works so well was due to the natural lighting. Obviously the video is 90% filmed outside and the use of un-natural lighting would have been impossible, however in my opinion this only added to the intensity of the shot. The hillside shots were particularly effective because of the time of day. We arrived at location just as the sun was going down, and as we set up the shot the sun faded just behind the monument. I centred the dancing in the middle of the monument and filmed until the sun went down. In post-production I saw how effective the shot was and it was clear that to make this even more impressive, I would make a direct link to the lyrics of the song and apply 'purple sky' to the shot.