There were a variety of responses from my quantitative research. These included;
- The video works extremely well with the music.
- The lip synching was flawless.
- The performance was very convincing and the artist looked like she knew the song well.
- The narrative at the start and end of the production was a very good idea and provided an extra layer for the production.
- The mise en scene was good for the song.
- Slows motion and cross fades were very effective.
- Very professional looking video.
- Maybe too many studio shots.
- Some of the studio shots weren’t as good as the town/location shots.
Next I wanted to complete an in depth interview with members of my target audience. One person who fitted this target audience perfectly was Sophie Griffiths. Sophie is a 19 year old female, B-C1 on the jicnar scale, materialist, post modernists and hedonist with a passion for pop music. We were originally going to conduct the interview over Facebook to save time but I thought that it would be more appropriate to record it on a DV camera whilst she was watching my video. After recording there were problems with the tape yet due to other commitment by the both of us we didn't have time to re record the interview.
After completing this audience research I was able to see that there were different responses for each person, even when they were members of the same target audience. This could be down to cultural capital and pleasures derived from the text.
Overall I feel I successfully offered my target audience the pleasures that they wanted by using both direct and indirect response.
Pleasure and consumption within media texts use the theory of ‘uses and gratifications approach’. This suggests that the audience gratify their needs by viewing and reflecting on the values given by media products. Within my media texts I believe that I met the needs of my target audience. For example one pleasure that my target audience wanted was a mixture of redundant and entropic behaviour; within my media products I offered a house style throughout (redundant) whilst also not overly sexualising the female and in fact showing the female as being control of her sexuality as a form of entropy.
Within my target audience I couldn’t be too entropic as the target audience (18-24 year old female) revel in being able to recognise certain house styles whilst reject the entropic behaviour that is out of the norm. However I also wanted to appeal to a wider audience of B-C1s and therefore I included the short background narrative to try and set it apart from the usual pop videos. I chose to do this as during my planning some of the target audience suggested that they were bored of the usual Cheryl Cole pop/dance video and Katy Perry’s too entopic behaviour.
In both interviews the two members of my target audience had slightly different opinions. David Morley argues that audiences adopt different reading positions in relation to the text (cultural studies approach) and was something that is reflected in my audience research.
Stacy took a more preferred reading of the text, accepting the norms and values provided by the text. This could also argue as being an example of effects theory in how Stacy was directly affected by the text. She mentioned that she sympathised with the artist and connected with her on a personal level.
Sophie on the other hand seemed to take a negotiated reading. She accepted the majority of the meanings and values within the text yet some she didn’t. For example Stacy mentioned that she understood that the video symbolised the artist breaking free of being with her boyfriend and enjoying life whereas Sophie seemed to take the view of the artist having too much screen time. This could be an example of Reception theory, where the audience is active when reading/watching the text and make their own thoughts on the video.
On the other hand this could also be down to cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu argued that social groups develop different types of ‘cultural capital’ depending on their class, experience and education etc. Cultural capital is the informal knowledge that we have – some may have more than others, yet we have different types of cultural capital depending on our social context.
According to Bourdieu, different groups will praise certain types of cultural capital more than others.
This was something demonstrated by the interviews with Sophie and Stacy. It could be argued that Stacy has a higher ‘cultural capital’ as she understood the hidden meanings and values that were not as obvious in the text. She immediately picked up on way that the artist was wearing contemporary clothes in more old fashioned locations, making the artist more prominent and making the audience draw their eyes to her and how the edits were placed so that they would ‘cut to the beats’ and the variety of different editing techniques. She also picked up on the fact that the narrative structure had a more todorovian structure and was showing the artist coming out of a dream sequence, rather than real life.
Sophie however thought that the locations were too old for the contemporary artist to be shot in. This could be an example of both oppositional reading (where the audience member disagrees with the values shown) and aberrant reading (when the audience member lacks the cultural capital to understand the text). It may however be that Stacy has more knowledge of the genre of music that we were working in.
I also had to make sure the coherence between my video and print work was extremely noticeable, as I wanted to allow the target audience to recognise the house style without having to work too hard. My target audience revel in gaining cultural capital and that’s why I made my narrative and ‘hidden’ meanings not too obscure and the house style quite clear. This was a pleasure I offered to my audience, as gaining cultural capital promotes importance and hierarchy within their audience group.
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