Audience Evaluation - Part 2

The other part of our audience evaluation, aside from the focus group of students in our class, was to take a version of the video that we rendered out onto a DVD and show it to various friends who could comment on the video, giving us a further level of evaluation on our video, going past just one viewing in class. We had the following rough set of questions as guidelines for the viewers:

1) How do you think we could improve the video?
2) What particularly did you like about it?
3) What particularly did you dislike about it?
4) How well did the music fit the content of the video?
5) What age group do you think this video suits best?
6) If you saw the video with no sound, which genre of music would you think it belonged to?
7) What gender group do you think this video suits best?
8) How powerful an effect did the end of the video have?

There was an almost universal opinion for the first question, that we could improve the video by either putting in an extra section in the middle, or having some sort of incident happen to the character while he is walking towards the train platform. This tied in with the responses to the third question, which labelled this central section as the part most people disliked, with comments of it being “too drawn out” and “boring after a while”. However, one aspect which was commented on as being liked was the effect we put on here, by overlaying two versions of the same clip with a slight time difference, and reducing the opacity of one, we created a blurred, “drunken” visual effect which helped towards establishing the physical state of the character as he enters this final decision.
The music was pretty well complimented as fitting the video, particularly by the people who I explained some of the lyrics to, who said the incidents happening in the video matched well with the lyrics of the song, and also that the generally dark feel of the video went well with the title of the song, “Rock Is Cursed”, and it’s general storyline of someone being out of luck and at the end of their rope. Most people accurately said that if they just saw the video with no audio over it, it would probably still reflect the rock genre, with other answers being the metal genre, as it is often darker, and one suggestion of punk rock. Due to the themes of alcoholism and depression in the video, along with the dark ending of the character’s probable suicide, most viewers said the video was best aimed at a slightly more mature audience. The almost universal thought was that the video and music suited males more than females, with a girl who the video was shown to commenting that it was “too depressing”.
People’s opinions on the end of the video were varied. Some who saw it thought it was indeed very powerful, and had tremendous shock value, while others thought it was unnecessary and made our video depressing. Overall, we feel that the ending was a good decision, as it makes out video much more memorable, and really pushes to the forefront the effects of depression on our central character.