2. To start our audience research, we conducted a
questionnaire about the pressures on young people and
what our target audience (11-19 year olds) liked to see
from a documentary. We asked questions about what
kind of presenter they preferred and the elements they
liked in a documentary. We did this as we could then
gain an insight into the kind of documentary that we
should make so that it would appeal to our audience.
The strength of a documentary depends on whether the
audience liked the documentary or not and to find out
what aspects they do like, we made this questionnaire.
Another set of questions that we asked were about
mental health issues, this was a key topic we wanted to
address in the documentary so the documentary would
have an educational benefit. We wanted to talk about
things that we thought teenagers like ourselves would
have dealt with so, we asked “do you think there is too
much pressure from teachers and families to achieve
high grades?”. We gained answers for all of our
questions that influenced the making of our
documentary in some way. For example, we used a
voiceover narration for most of our documentary
excluding the introduction, and we used statistics
regarding mental health.
PRE-PRODUCTION
3. Some of the key answers that we gained, included that our
target audience preferred a voice-over narrator, hence we
decided to do this to appeal to our audience. We used a
voice over for most of our documentary, with a short on
screen presenting clip at the beginning. Majority of the
audience preferred a female narrator and this inclined our
decision to choose a female narrator for both the
documentary and the radio trailer. The most-liked element
of a documentary was the use of statistics and facts,
subsequently this is something that we used frequently.
One question we asked that influenced which experts we
interviewed in our documentary, was ‘What do you find the
most pressuring about college life?’ with the top answer
being that they felt pressurised about making decisions for
the future. So as we got this result, we interviewed the
careers adviser in college on what she thought. Only two of
the people who answered our questionnaire responded
with a no to the question ‘Do you know of any young
person to suffer with a mental health disorder due to the
pressures of society?. We knew that mental health was a
topic we wanted to talk about in the documentary and so
audience feedback and research was a fundamental part in
ensuring we got the correct information as so many people
suffer or know someone who suffers with this issue.
Screenshot from documentary
4. The last key answer we got that influenced our decision
making process was that students faced too much
pressure from teachers and parents in achieving good
grades. From this, we could talk about the fact that older
generations may not understand the issues that young
people face.
The next piece of audience feedback we got was from
our peers in our media class who were in the age
bracket of our target audience (11-19 year olds).
Another group marked our blogs on what we had done
so far regarding how good our topic research was, also
research into existing products, audience research,
planning of interviews and IT skills on the blog. We
gained an excellent answer for one of our areas
however we could improve on others including for
example, the use of IT on our blog. So we decided to
use YouTube for audience feedback at the end of the
coursework and used presentation websites such as
Prezi and Emaze.
5. The next questionnaire we conducted was to find out
what radio station, TV channel and TV listings magazine
that our audience would want or expect to see our
products on. I did this questionnaire on a website called
SurveyMonkey which allowed me to share the
questionnaire I had made via a link. The link then took
the audience to my questionnaire which they could
answer from their phones or computer. From our results,
the website generated graphs. We could recognise the
most popular channels from our target audience and
use this to our advantage. We listened to our audience
as they were telling us what they wanted in a
documentary, therefore I think that this is a key strength
throughout our research and planning. To listen to what
the audience wants and produce a documentary with
our own creative influences is what I would deem as
successful. We asked our audience ‘What channel
would you expect to see a documentary about
teenagers on?’ and the most popular answer was
Channel 4. Another key question of this questionnaire
was ‘Which TV Listings Magazine would you be most
likely to read?’ with the majority vote going to What’s on
TV.
6. From these results and the research into the
background and audiences of each channel or station,
we could tailor our products, for example adding ‘after
the break’ to the ending of our documentary as
Channel 4 includes advertisement breaks and
including the Channel 4 logo in our magazine double
page. Both questionnaires were part of pre-production
audience feedback, as we had not yet made the
documentary or any other products. These both were
primary research as they came straight from our target
audience and this was a valuable part in ensuring that
we could adapt our products to our audience. I was
pleased with how this primary research was carried out
as we got a range of different ethnicities to gain a
varied representation.
The last key question that influenced our decisions
was ‘Which radio station do you listen to the
most?’ and the most popular answer being Capital
FM. The audience thought the same as I did, as I
am a teenager also, we anticipated our results to
be similar to what our group liked.
7. In terms of post-production, we decided that we wanted to
use a range of IT techniques including videoing and voice
recording along with more traditional forms of audience
feedback in the form of questionnaires.
Before we started our radio trailer questionnaire, we played
it to some people in our class who said that they could not
hear the audio and that it is quiet in some places. We
changed the sound levels on the parts that were too quiet
and then we could put the updated version on the blog
ready for audience feedback. For the construction of the
radio trailer questionnaire, we decided to send out a
trial/pilot questionnaire in order to get responses from our
audience and to see whether the questionnaire made sense
for a non-specialist audience. I asked 3 people to complete
the questionnaire and included a question asking how this
questionnaire could be improved. From this I altered the
final questionnaire, for example by adding more open
questions and also ensuring that the multiple choice
answers do not overlap or confuse.
8. I then sent out questionnaires to my target audience regarding our
radio trailer, I played the audio and then asked them to fill out
questions honestly. I found that everybody we asked liked the
length of the trailer, and I personally also liked the length of the
trailer as all the information could be put in along with interview
clips which was effective in getting different opinions across. I
asked whether our audience enjoyed the use of music, with 60% of
people saying the music was excellent and 40% saying good. I felt
that if time allowed, we could have used perhaps more than one
music clip or intensified the music in specific parts. However, most
people said it was excellent so it appealed to our target audience.
The audience told us that half of the people we asked said they
strongly agreed with the following statement: I would watch the
documentary after listening to the radio trailer. The other half said
they agreed with the statement, so this means that the audience
thinks our radio trailer was good but could be improved to get an
overall ‘strongly agree’ result. However, as in Stuart Hall’s
reception theory, everybody sees media products differently due to
their own experiences and their views, subsequently, it would be
unreasonable to expect an overall ideal response. I conducted
verbal interviews too, and recorded my findings.
9. To get feedback on our documentary, a focus
group was organised, we got three people and
asked them questions, and the focus group
meant that the interviewees could elaborate on
their answers. I learnt from this audience
feedback, that everybody enjoyed the opening of
the documentary, especially with the medium
close up shot of the girl pushing the books over.
Our group liked this too and when deciding which
clips to use, we knew we wanted to keep this
scene. Furthermore, they thought that the
documentary was informative as we included a
range of different facts and statistics. This was
something that we liked and made sure to
include in our documentary frequently. We used
this in the beginning as an opening fact to give
an understanding into our topic and we found
that our audience liked this aspect. We also used
facts in order to conclude our results from our
voting box.
10. One aspect of audience feedback we gained showed us that
we had achieved our aims as we involved a range of people
including the younger and older generations. We
consciously tried to do this but the only people we could
interview in college that were experts happened to be white
women, who were relevant to our topic, therefore
sometimes we struggled to do this. Our audience also gave
us an interest rating of 9 out of 10, this shows that a
strength to our documentary is that we chose an interesting
topic. I thought that one aspect we could have done better
was to make the transitions between scenes smoother,
however our audience did not seem to notice that as they
said that the scenes blended well. We did change this
before handing in our final copy of the documentary. This
may just have been us being critical and looking into more
detail than our audience did. Overall we did not have any
negative reviews, which was good but it would have been
good to gain an insight into something we could have
improved on. We chose to include questions, which would
cover a range of things from the music used, the opening,
background footage, titles and more. We covered all the
areas that we included in our documentary to get a rounded
opinion.
11. We conducted a questionnaire alongside our focus
group, and we did this during our media lesson to
around 20 students. All students were in our target
audience and the scale of the group meant that we
could get a better view of what they thought along with
our smaller focus group that was done previously. The
first question asked was whether our audience liked
the opening of our documentary. This was a
unanimous yes response which was good because we
could then see that our audience liked the visual
representations of the stress that occurs with
teenagers.
This question relates to the amount of background
footage that we used and whether it was a good
amount or not. The overall majority vote said ‘yes’ to a
good amount of background footage being used. A
smaller amount of people said ‘no’ and ‘kind of’ so
taking this into account, we know that most people
thought there was a good amount of background
footage and some perhaps thought that there should
have been more.
12. Most people said ‘yes’ to finding the use of statistics
and facts informative, so this told us that the way we
portrayed information across was successful. On the
other hand, 1 person said no. So, from this we can see
that perhaps too many statistics were used that a
member of our target audience did not like and that the
use of statistics on screen was not appealing to them.
We have learnt from this question that our audience
mostly liked this part of our documentary.
Our documentary title is ‘Are today’s teenagers the
most stressed generation?’ and we look at how the
different generations perceive issues that teenagers
deal with and whether today’s teenagers have it more
difficult. Every reply we got was a ‘yes’ response and
that revealed that we had given a fair representation. I
thought that the responses that we gained from this
specific question meant that our documentary aims
were successful as we had a good representation of
different people with the way we executed research and
interviews.
13. This question was about the music that was used in our
documentary, so we could find out what our audience thought.
However, when playing our documentary to our class through the
speakers, rather than the headphones we used to edit our
documentary, there were a few issues. We got a comment saying
that somebody else had notice a few glitches so after doing our
questionnaire, we went back to the computer to fix the audio
problems. This did not take long and so getting the audience
feedback was a vital part in making sure we did not miss any
problems. It is always good to have somebody new watch our
documentary and give comments because we have been working
on it for while and may have become immune to issues which
somebody else would pick up on. Therefore, audience feedback is
a crucial element.
We tried to make our documentary as realistic as possible
because our topic featured some serious issues such as
anxiety and depression which is common in teenagers. We
tried to create realism by conducting interviews, using facts
and doing our own voting box research. We used real college
students and experts as it is a documentary and not a film or
fictional TV drama. I have learnt from this that our
documentary was portrayed as realistic through the use of
vox pops, and this is something that was imperative that we
used.
14. We did face to face interviews to gain audience feedback for our
magazine listing double page spread, we asked questions about
the title (masthead), layout, pull quotes, images, colour scheme
etc. The focus group we completed meant that we could control
who we asked to be in our feedback, and we made sure they
were people in our target audience. Hence, from these questions
we could see what the audience thought about our magazine and
the ways in which we could improve. The first question was ‘Does
the masthead pull you into reading the article?’ and the effect of
this is that the masthead should be large and stand out, however
it should still be related to the topic of the article. The masthead is
large and one person in our focus group said the font linked in to
the theme of school and education. Teenagers are most likely to
be in school or college so I was pleased with this comment as it
meant that our theme is prominent and stands out without
needing to read the article. The layout according to our audience
is ‘simplistic’ and I find this to be a compliment as then all the text
is clear and easy to read along with it being appealing due to the
use of images. Henceforth, our audience has told us that the
layout is a strength to our magazine. One suggestion was to bring
out the pull quote from the page further, so we acted on this by
adding a ‘stroke’ to our text, which essentially means adding a
shadow in order to bring that text off the page. We liked the
positioning of the pull quotes and decided to keep them where
they were. One weakness of our magazine is that it was hard to
see some of the text, at the bottom of the double page spread.
Learning this, we made some parts bigger in order for them to be
seen more clearly.
Masthead
Pull quote
Byline
Simplistic text layout
