Feedback from the audience feedback (!)

What did I/we expect?

0As we have aimed our media product, in terms of our primary audience, at more sophisticated audiences (i.e. those in the A/B income bracket who are mainly thinkers and innovators), we expect that our audience would mainly be active. This would mean that these audience members would have the capability to question the ideologies and (stereotypical) representations that we have conveyed in our opening sequence.

Were the audience members form our audience feedback active viewers

though?0 I feel that our audience feedback members were fairly active, but

not as active as perhaps expected. This may have been because I asked questions that didn’t delve deeper into their opinions of the representations shown.

0 However, Glenn (the male audience feedback member) touched on the fact that he thought that the costumes for the actors were not quite accurate, as he said that they possibly should have worn “shell suits, track-suit bottoms, trainers”, due to having experience in retail, and having people (some from the working class) thieving at the shop he works at. This could be an example of how our sophisticated audience members may take the stereotypes (of the protagonist) as read as opposed to challenging them.

How does this show that our audience feedback members were

active?0Glenn’s comment about mise-en-scene elements i.e. the

inaccuracy of costume (and props(?)) could also indicate he has almost compared our representations with his experiences and opinion, rather than reading the representation. Therefore, disagreeing with out representations (as he then realises that our representations are not a reflection on reality) gives evidence that he in particular, has actively questioned and challenged the representations, making him more of a sophisticated viewer and therefore an active viewer.

However…

0Neither of our audience feedback members mentioned any ideas or opinions on the representations of Rosie, such as the representation of an empowered female for example and whether her gender had any influence on their interpretation of our product.

0This may have happened maybe because I didn’t ask specific enough questions or perhaps these audience members were not able to ‘notice’ these representations.

Why would this be?

0 This may have been because sometimes, we fell in the trap of being too stereotypical for a sophisticated audience, and therefore they were unable to fully pick up on the representations, such as the empowered female.

0 In order to have improved on this, we could have perhaps been less stereotypical and even swap our primary and secondary audiences, so that our sophisticated viewers were our secondary audience. This may be beneficial, as our current secondary audience (those in the E income bracket) would be able to relate to the character more easily as a result of personal identity (according to Blumer and Katz’s uses and gratifications.)

Continued...

0Evidence to suggest that this might have been a better audience set-up, as our audience feedback members reflect and talk more about formal aspects as opposed to aspects of the narrative, as they perhaps were unable to relate to the narrative content. Particularly, as Glenn especially didn’t relate to the engagement between characters over the money.

So… did we chose the right audience in the end??

0 In the end, as a result of our audience feedback, we were right in choosing an older A/B income bracket audience, as they seemed to have enjoyed the intellectual audience of pleasure of genre, and also enjoyed the information that our media product conveyed about social issues.

0 On the other hand, it could be argued that we over-estimated our sophisticated audience, in the sense that they were slightly confused by the sophisticated structure or our opening sequence narrative, especially as Julie (the female audience feedback member) wanted clarification at the end of the opening sequence with diegetic dialogue from the policeman.

So... Did we choose the right audience in the end?? (con...)

0 Originally, there was some swearing in the dialogue that we then removed from our opening sequence and, according to the Media institutional regulations of ‘bbfc’, the inclusion of anti- social behaviour such as theft all requires us to rate our film a 15. Therefore I think that we chose the appropriate film certification as although there was no swearing in the opening sequence, this would not mean that there would be swearing in the rest of the film. In addition having our certification at 15 still allows all of our audience members, both primary and secondary to watch the film as they are all over 15 years of age.

Continued...

0 However, the audience feedback only consisted of 2 members and therefore maybe this verdict would be more reliable/ accurate if we had more people watch, and express their opinions on our opening sequence. This could have been improved by possibly doing an online survey via the use of web 2.0, whereby our target audience via Facebook/ Twitter are able to answer the same questions as those asked in the audience feedback. This would enable us to fully gage and evaluate whether these target audiences were the correct choices.