Group: Audience Research

Focus Group

For audience research, we decided to do a small focus group of five people to discuss our ideas and receive qualitative data. This was very useful for us as it helped us understand the perspectives of our target audience and to see what ideas would work and what ideas would not work.
We played the track to the group and asked them to write down an initial response to the song. After that we discussed the things they associated with the song. We then told the group our ideas for the video and asked for their response and opinions.

Here are two examples of the mind map responses:

Mind-map by focus group member.

Mind-map by other focus Group member.

 Drawings by individual in our focus group.

Drawings by member of Focus Group

These responses have influenced and caused us to reconsider some aspects of our video ideas, particularly for our narrative ideas. Our focus group had some quite specific ideas and images that they thought should be included in the video, however they often conflicted with each other so we couldn't incorporate all these ideas into one video.

Quick Survey

We also asked a few people what they would expect to see in our video because of the huge differences and response we got by doing our focus group. Here are the questions we asked;

In your opinion, what location would be the most appropriate for a music video for this song?

• Woodland  Beach  High Street  Other (Please Specify)

After listening to the song, Is there anything specific that you think should be in the music video?

Do you think that the music video should be set in the past, present or future?

In your opinion, what mood does the song portray?

What demographics would you expect to appear in the music video?

Would you expect to see any particular colours in the music video?

Finally, what message do you think that the song is trying to get across to the audience?

The results we got were quite positive as it reinforced what we found in our focus groups about how the video should be bright, and positive, however some responses we are unable to use as people were unsure about questions or how they felt about certain things. Here is some example answers;

1. Woodland
2. Excitement. I think it should be of a group of peoples journey through woodland. Then during the chorus something exciting happens. One of the group is videoing it and videoing himself to give a cool realistic edge.
3. Present
4. happiness, excitement, positive
5. Don't really know what demographics is
6. Blue and Red
7. A bad history that you don't want to go back to, you don't want to remind yourself of.

1. Start of in a city like London and then move to woodlands, wants to get out of crowded places
2. Idea of running away from mistakes 
3. Present
4. Kind of freeing and absolving of sins
5. Initially men, but on reflection I think a girl running away would be quite good
6. Bright colours, lights, blue 
7. Guy wants to be in the outdoors

Doing Audience research has been the most helpful planning resources to use because from this we were able to find out what our Target Audience felt when they heard the song, after doing this we have decided to make changes to the narrative but still keep strong Ideas that we had before. e.g. Now our character will still be starting in an urban location and arriving in the woodland area however from this he will meet other characters (Creatures, Masks, face paint) who will change the structure and course of the video.