The Focus Group

In order to gather feedback for our music video plans so far, me and Beth put together a note on my Facebook page, which included the previously posted final concept, the song and some information on possible costumes and locations we would use. At the end of the note, we devised five questions that should help us continue to tweak and improve our plans. These questions were:

1. Would you recognise this as a folk-genre music video? Why/why not?
2. Do you feel that this video targets your age range? How/why?
3. Does this sound like an authentic music video that you would expect to be broadcast on TV? Why/why not?
4. Would you watch it? Why/why not?
5. How would you improve it?

I then tagged the people who most closely fitted the target audience for our video so that we could gather the most relevant replies. These were some of the replies:

Everyone responded very well to the setting and appearance of our video, and found that they could draw links with the folk genre easily due to the stereotypical elements we included to enforce our genre - natural, woodland settings, for example - which meant that the genre could be deduced even without the music, as noted by Chris in the comments.

Whilst two of the main three who commented suggested that the age range for the folk genre should be more generalised, the youngest of the three, Jack, suggested that people of his age would be more interested in more mainstream videos and themes, which enforcers me and Beth's understanding that we should be aiming our video at a more mature audience.

What was most important for us to understand was how believable and authentic our video appeared; all three agreed that from what they could see of it so far, it was indeed authentic, but perhaps, as it had dark themes, it ought to be aired later. This reading of the text is something me and Beth will perhaps need to attempt to alter - although our video has an appearance of darkness, there is supposed to be an air of quirkiness and surreality to alleviate this and make it more accessible. We'll have to think of a way to bring through this lightness in a more dominant manner.

As these people are representative of the sorts of audience we hope to target with our video, it was also important to understand if the video would interest and engage them. Whilst, as Chris pointed out, the watchability of a video is partly based on the music it is representing, he also noted that the themes and imagery were "intriguing" and so would watch it out of interest in the imagery. Jack said that he would watch it due to its narrative plotline, which therefore appears to attract an audience, as people would be obliged to watch it to the end to seek the resolution of the narrative sequence, and Emma noted that she would like it simply due to its genre and that the video was representative of it.

Whilst it seems that most were happy with the video's concept as it was, which is cheering, Chris suggested that perhaps we could make less of the repetitive untying of the ropes, unless we could find ways to vary it. This will be very helpful when we come to shooting and editing, as we now know how to approach these shots and how to add interest to them, as well as knowing how many of these shots to add to the final cut so as to not get too repetitive.