You have made many sound points in relation to the audience feedback. I feel that you have observed this points in developing ideas and evaluating the effectiveness on your product. You do only focus on the music video and not the poster or CD digipak. I also feel that you have really tried to apply Hall's theory of audience and with some success. I would like top see more points covered if you can - use other key points form the video - for example was there no reaction to the theme of religion through the crucifix or consideration to the fact that the male character was killed? Is there any reference to the idea that this was a MV on prostitution as a theme that was connoted?
A really good effort well done. Perhaps discuss some points with your group and see if you can perform a focus group?
decide on where something is a success or a failure
What is focus group?
A form of qualitative in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging.Questions are asked in an interactive group setting where participants are free to talk with other group members.
For task 3, I was to evaluate on feedbacks given from the audience. I set up my own focus group involving different types of audience from different nationality such as Russian, Bulgarian, British,Chinese and German.
I have also given out questionnaires for them to fill up.
As a result, I have learnt that they have different interpretations( German male audience thinks that it was about loneliness and desire and British female audience thinks that it was about domestic relationship) with similar idea such that it was clear for all of them that this music video was about broken relationship. This made me realise that I as a producer could only connotate hoping to draw the audience into the right direction of what I want them to think but the audience have the freedom to denotate how they would want to think. This often happens because of different society they live in or how they were brought up, or even gender. Since this video was targeted to a niche British audience, thankfully most British audience recognised straight away that it was about domestic violence and challenging against the religion.
Nevertheless, the focus group agreed that her star image was rather sexy, disturbed and erotic which made the audience feeling uncomfortable but drawn unto her performance at the same time and that is what I want her ( Dummy)star image to be.
According to Stuart Hall, the theorist, there are 3 decoding outcomes for the 'decoding' process :
preferred reading- ( how producer want the audience to read what he intend to show)
negotiated reading
and oppositional reading ( process of different reading)
Since our target audience falls under the category of D and E under JICNARS scale, they some symbolic meaning might have too heavy for them such as why was the cross facing towards her.
Most audience who are British who listens to alternative grungy genre, were intrigued and they would most likely buy the album. Through this, I have learnt as a producer that the audience point of view are very important as they determined what is good and bad. Therefore, it is always important to have a target audience that will be interested in buying the album as not everyone is going to like the genre of the song.
YouTube Video comments:
haunting atmosphere! Clear what is going on throughout the video. This is my intention to create haunting atmosphere to the audience.
I like this video. It has a performance elements such as hands choreography and the storyline is clear and easy to understand. ( It was great effective choreography as I deliberately wanted to have the choreography to symbolise domestic abuse)
Great my friends!
Holy F'n moly.This is totally outstanding.Great job Sophia. I didnt not know you had this posted....I just got lucky and stumbled across this.Way cool how with the faces you make.Very impressive. Did you get to see my video yet.Im playing piano with orchestra.Come by my channel and take a listen.10/10 for this video and song.Masterpiece for sure!
This shows the artist's fan has a follow up of her songs. THis is an evident of how prosumer works and share their products among each other. Internet helps the young prosumers to be able to share and view the works of each others.
Is the focus point of this the video? The song sounds exactly the same as the original (PJ Harvey) song. Am I missing something or am I right? :)
I *love* this! Edgy, iconic.. just an altogether a great song and video! I was expecting a killer video from The Daunting but this is truly outstanding. Just WOW!
What you have posted so far is very clear and relevant - this is a good post, but it is incomplete. Can you post the rest of the evaluation a soon as possible. Response is well presented on the blog.
IN what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Through mise en scenes, performance base and editing in the video to help illustrates conventions and codes.
This mise en scenes is a conventional because of the mise-en-scenes as it is symbolic and it immediately helps the audience to understand it.
The cross is a methaphor for religion or judgement and having her in this position shows that she is guilty of something. this is semiotic because it offers a denotation and connotations to the audience what genre of the song is which is dark, edgy and narrative.
Another symbolic code which we used in the music video is through colours. In this shot, we see a contrasting colours to create an impact. White represents purity and innocense and the audience would have thought that she is a victim and whereas her boyfriend is in a dark shade of clothing signifying that he is a villain although he was murdered by her. This is to show that we are from the artist point of view and the audience are asked to take her side. The fact that the murder happens on the bed signifies that he was in her territory and it also symbolise domestic as our main theme was about domestic violence.
