After looking at our focus group, there were many issues and worries that we had about our product, yet at the same time we got a good amount of positive criticsm. We showed our focus group the Music Video that we had created and looked for their reaction, and after showing them the video we found that there were a mix of reactions.
After finding this reactions we found that many of the focus group were unaware of what the Music Video was about and they believed that it was actually about Domestic Violence which was our original theme rather than the new theme of S&M. After explaining what the production was trying to achieve and show the audience the focus group found that it made much more sense than they had previously thought.
We moved onto asking the group about what ages they believed to be appropriate to view this Music Video and they thought that it should be available to be viewed by children as young as 12 yet a part of the group highly disagreed and thought that it should be viewed by children between the ages of 14 and 15. However, this focus group was built up of 17 year olds and when we asked the older generation of viewers what they believed they said that they would not want their children watching this as it is reasonably dark and disturbing.
The group believed that the poster and digipak definitely portrayed the image we were trying to achieve but they also added that it could have been slightly more edgy and different which would link in perfectly with the Video and the image we were trying to get across to the audience. One problem we had with our focus group was that it was all female therefore it was a limited sample, preferably we would have had a few boys within the same age group within our focus group. However, this was a seriously good way of getting feedback from our target audience.
After looking at Hall we realsied that the readings of this video can be seperated into three different groups
- the preffered reading: this would be for people to understand our product and realise that the concept of S&M is what we were trying to achieve. We would also like people to be more aware of the concept as it is often ignored by mainstream society.
- the negotiated reading: this would be that the group did not understand the concept and thought it was about Domestic violence but would still like the issues to be addressed.
the oppositional reading: this would be that they found it disturbing and that they did not recognise what we were trying to achieve by producing a video about S&M. This has arisen through both the hanging scene and the suffocation scene which were found as disturbing, however they would not have a problem with the way in which our band was set up and their performance in the video.
Finally, we realised that our audience was definitely not passive and had a mjor input into the way our product worked and how it didnt. All this extra information helped because we could accomidate to our audiences preferences before the Video is released.
