1. EVALUATION QUESTION 3
WHAT HAVE YOU LEANED FROM AUDIENCE FEEDBACK

2. THE IMPORTANCE OF AUDIENCE FEEDBACK IN MEDIA
When thinking of other media products like mine, they all have to go through a process which includes having
feedback from people who view the product before it is distributed and on its journey to its final form. This is a logical
way of working to create a product as good as it can be. Why wait until you’ve distributed to get constructive criticism
and what to improve and what people like when you could get all of that out the way before, making the product a lot
more likable.
Audience feedback not only helps you determine what in your project you need to improve and keep the same, but it
also lets you know what your audience likes so you have more of an idea of what to focus on. For example, if I made a
media product and I had my targeted audience give me feedback on the draft and 7 out of the 20 mentioned
something along the line of ‘include more fight scenes’ - if it was an action film. Then I would have a good
understanding that my targeted audience really likes fight scenes within a action film and that would increase my
chance of approval from them.
Audience feedback is support for your foundation, with a lot of audience feeback and constructive critisism, you can
work your way up the ladder to a higher success rate.

3. THE VARIETY OF FEEDBACK TYPES
Collecting the audience feedback is done through different types of feedback methods. For starters, when constructing
my audience feedback techniques I had to decide between two different factors. Qualitative and quantitative. So what are
these two words? Well, they are most related to scientific research, they are the way in which you collect data. Qualitative
is data that has lots of quality to it and quantitative is data that shows up in statistics. So I had to decide if I wanted
audience feedback in the form of numbers, or detailed criticism and in depth responses. Here is the pros and cons I had in
mind when choosing between the two –
PROS CONS
Qualitative research • You receive a greater understanding of the data you
collect in more quality
• You have a wider range of criticisms to work with
• Makes it a lot harder to collect
because you need peoples time and
concentration
• You research less people
Quantitative research • You gain statistics which are easy to put into graphs
and show correlations
• Makes it easier to collect information from people
because it’s quick
• You research a lot more people
• You don’t get a very wide range of
criticisms
• You don’t get any in depth quality
out of it

4. MY DECISION ON FEEDBACK TYPES
When looking at the pros and cons I decided that I would go with qualitative research because I wanted that wider
variety of criticism and I also wanted it in depth so I could understand exactly what it was I needed to improve.
After this I had to decide how I would collect my audience feedback. There are loads of ways you can collect feedback
like test audiences before the release of your final product and forums open to anyone to give you criticism and
comments, this is the same as social network sites as well. With social network taking over you can get anyone from all
over the globe to give you feedback, you can also put surveys on both forums and social network, along side a paper
based version. I really liked the idea of using social media because it ties into the subject of media studies, but for exam
purposes I removed all social media so this wasn’t an option. I then looked at possible using forums, but there was the
risk that my questions would be ignored because not many people just have time to reply to a random survey online. I
then decided on using questionnaires but with qualitative questions. All of the audience feedback was going to be on
my poster, review and film. I used different techniques with each of my products so that I could try and move towards
trying all different types of feedback techniques.

5. THE REVIEW
As mentioned in my evaluation question 2, I made a review for my film based on Little White Lies
reviews. This product was the hardest one to get feedback on. My first bit of feedback for this was just
making sure all the grammar was perfect as it is in Little White Lies reviews. For this I got my parents
to check the review through and make sure it all flowed. They gave me tips on what to improve and
told me where my grammatical errors where. I then went over the review and changed all of that to
follow my audience feedback.
I then showed a couple people that lay under the category of my targeted audience who were all
friends so were fine to take the time out and read it. I then wrote down what they liked and disliked
about the review to help me finalise the review. I got some of the following comments from three
friends that looked at my review –
After this I handed it into my teacher who then read over it. Being one who has experience in Little
White Lies she was able to give improvements. Going through three audience feedback processes in
total.
Friends (also target audience) Positives Improvements
Josh Good layout Use bigger words to be more descriptive
Billy Nice use of description and play
with the title
Use a picture that is part of your film, not off the
internet
Jared Good layout make the text longer to add more detail

6. THE POSTER
Also mentioned in Evaluation question 2 I made a poster to support my short film and help distribute
and promote the short film. This was one of the easier products to get feedback on because I did so
many drafts before hand to make sure I got a really good final product and knew exactly what I
wanted to make. I made 3 drafts, poster A B and C, and these were all reviewed before I got to my
final.
For this I decided to make a questionnaire just getting an understanding on what my audience liked
and disliked about my poster. Here is what the survey looked like -
The survey was answered by 10 different people, all from my
targeted audience giving me a nice range of answers and gave
me an understanding of what people liked and disliked. I did
put some tick box’s with the choice of other. Here are my
results –
• 6/10 said poster C was their favorite
• 4/10 mentioned they liked that I kept it simple
• 7/10 said they wanted more colours because it was all
black and white
• 5/10 said it looked like a horror
• 9/10 preferred tagline 1
I used this data to improve my drafts and then I used the
technique again on my second draft leading me to my final
piece displayed on the far right. My final poster

7. THE SHORT FILM
My main media product was the film. This was biggest media product of them all meaning it required a lot of audience
feedback in order to make it as good as possible. We did face some dilemmas when trying to gain audience feedback for
this, because if there was problems with them actually filming itself in the audiences opinion, it wasn't as easy to just go
and re-record or add new recordings to the film due to having to re-organise the group and maintain continuity which
would have been a really big struggle with everything else we had to get on and do like the editing.
Most of the audience were aware of the situation due to them making shorts themselves, so a lot of the comments we
got were constructive and to do with editing and sound. At the point of getting the review I decided to use a test
audience to all watch the film and then give feedback afterwards. As a class we watched each others films so we were all
benefiting from the session and all getting feedback for our shorts. The feedback was said by each group giving a feature
they liked and disliked and then we filled a sheet we were given by the teacher so we could take them into the editing suit
and sort out all of the improvements on Final Cut Pro.
At the time we didn’t have all of our audio in place because we were in the process of doing external noises and adding
music to build suspense and add to the emotion of our short. The comments we received from each gorup were the
following –
1. “make the transitions between each scene more fluent”
2. “try use match on action with the scenes you have”
3. “use a different font for the introduction”
4. “use effects to make dark scenes lighter like the phone robbing scene”
All of these points contributed to out final product and were all sorted out the following weeks after this to make sure our
short fitted with what was needed by the target audience.

8. HOW USEFUL WAS THE FEEDBACK?
All of the feedback given contributed to my improvements and helped me know what I had to work on making it really
important for my media products process.
I used all of the feedback I was given, and showed a clear improvement in my work due to this. For me the audience
feedback really helped, because my group would always say its really good and give not as harsh criticism which is why
when I asked people who didn’t share a group with me, I got a lot more criticism and was able to improve more. I also
think that we all have our own opinion, so what I think is really good and just how I want it, may not be the opinion of
my target audience, and the only way of finding that out is by getting audience feedback to ensure I can come to
decisions on whether what I think is right due to others agreeing, or if my audience is saying otherwise then it’s clear I
need to change or adjust the issue.
If this was a real media product I think it would help even more due to the product being more publicised and so there
will be a bigger audience. A bigger audience means more open criticism and so you would have to adjust your media
product more strictly. Using audience feedback would really help with that.
Although it was very helpful for me, I think there are some issues with audience feedback, such as the chances that the
people you interview have a different opinion to the rest of your target audience, so you may change something that
would actually be really liked by the rest of the audience. It’s also arguable the audience feedback drags you away from
your own personal work and can destroy the originality and art of the work.

9. CONCLUSION
I think feedback has been a way of monitoring my progress. It has really helped to support my work and build it up to as
good as it can be.
In the future I think I would use audience feedback a lot more, I would get data from a lot more people and use both
qualitative and quantitative to show both quality and evidence. This would support my work so much more and make it
better than I could ever make it without the feedback.
I think my feedback was really successful, but I would love to have done more to make my products better than they are
currently. Overall I think I have learned that audience feedback helps you think from more than one brain giving you the
best result.
NATHAN BUTCHER