SC & SW Audience Research Analysis and Results

From carrying out a Focus Group for our audience research, we were given more ideas from the group that we worked with. We had a group of 15 people (girls and boys from the ages between 16-21, as we thought that this age group is would be a great representative of the target audience for our music video of 15-24) who were all extremely enthusiastic about the prospect of being involved with the research.

We first played the track to our Focus Group and the group all came up with thoughts of narrative ideas, mise-en-scene, locations and characters. Some of the ideas that came up after the song was listened to were:
- love story's
- Images of love letters
- Black and White images
- Performance shots with bright lighting behind therefore creating silhouettes.
- Shots of people smoking
- Performing in a run down area.
- Close-ups of instruments
- People in love
- Letters being ripped up
- Close-ups of tears
- Girl running toward guy
- Many people said how the lyrics and visuals should link e.g band member loosening tie their tie because the lyrics in the first verse are - 'I loosen my tie, I loosen my tie.'
- Fast cutting rate.
- Close-ups of lead singer singing

Everyone then gave there ideas to us and the rest of the group and it was really useful as more ideas were being branched off and becoming more detailed, which we found very useful in a group discussion. All this feedback was very encouraging and creative and really helped us to develop our ideas and fill more shots for our music video. We particularly liked how the focus group were considering lighting as well as props and locations.

We then carried out a brief pitch to the focus group by showing them our ideas that we made on a powerpoint presentation for our class pitch and this helped the Focus Group to really understand the look and ideas that we wanted to carry out (after the focus group, we then added ideas onto our pitch for the class from the feedback that the focus group gave us.) The power point presentation involved showing images of our band members, the locations that we are considering, the props that we were think, costumes and the style that we are trying to achieve. The feedback of our ideas so far was very positive and the group thought that the ideas were unique and original. One issue that we thought would be a problem, being an all female production team, is that our ideas would be too girly and romantic, however from discussing with the focus group (including boys) they thought that our ideas were pretty neutral and interesting, which was really good to hear.

When we explained to our focus group about the narratives that we had thought about in the music video, we explained how we were going to use stills of random unique people in black and white shots throughout the chorus' of the music video wanting to 'Be Somebody'. When it came to discussing digipak ideas, someone came up with the idea of having one of those stills as the digipak cover as it creates some kind of mystery for the consumer, however it gets the message of the some across to the audience. We thought this was a really good idea and are considering pursuing it as an idea.

Overall, the focus group to find out audience research was extremely helpful in developing our ideas and inspiring us to be creative with our music video.