Evaluation Three - (c) What Have You Learnt From Your Audience Feedback?

Our Focus Groups:

At the very start of production, as a group we carried out a pilot focus group consisting of our class mates, this enabled us to gain a brief understanding of how a successful focus group should be. It also gave us the opportunity to prepare our model questions in order to ensure they were wide enough for our target audience to refer to. This also aided us in making sure our pitch and treatment was clear and understandable.

We then carried out our first official focus group. We randomly selected a group made up of both genders aged between 17 and 18. These people fit directly into our main target audience. However, it was unfortunate that the results we received didn't provide us with the answers we were hoping for which could have helped us improve our soap storyline and character ideas. Positively, there were no criticisms of our product, which could show that we succesfully appealed to their age group.

Once our trailer was finished, we decided on creating another focus group. We chose the most beneficial way was to set up the trailer in a room with an audience of our target group. We then filmed them watching it and then their responses to it straight afterwards. This turned out to be very successful we received positive feedback on things that worked well and nothing was pin-pointed that didn't work well, people enjoyed working out the mystery and found the characters easy to relate to. We then edited it and it can be seen on out soap website.

We also created a questionnaire which we gave to people of our target audience. This was to help us to find out what soaps they prefer to watch and why these particular soaps appeal to them. We concluded that most people enjoyed the good, mysterious story-lines, and found different characters they could relate to. This helped us to incorporate more beneficial ideas into our product.

Our soaps website was also shown to a group of similarly aged people from our target group. This enabled us to identify whether or not we was successful in targeting our chosen age group. Many believed the wide variation of pages and the basic layout was easy to use but at the same time attractive and interesting to read and there was a wide variation of information that would appeal to different teenage types.

I presented my TV guide front cover to a group of random people of various genders and ages to see what they thought of it. Many commented on the use of colour and the designs, many also commented on the use of fonts in order to portray the more important information. They agreed that it would be the sort of TV guide they would happily purchase and read.

Facebook:

We uploaded our trailer onto Facebook in order to receive even more positive and negative feedback, many people commented with positive feedback, mentioning the music, the use of fades to create more tension and the camera angles which created suspicion. Someone said it would have worked better with more of how the girl was killed, but after a debate with other audience members they agreed on it then giving away too much.The people who had access to watch our trailer fit into our target audience.