Screen Test: Audience Feedback

This post explains how we showed a rough draft of our music video, album cover, and social media page to some members of our target audience in order to receive helpful feedback.

The purpose of a screen test is to gain audience feedback about our work and see if there are any improvements that can be made. We decided to use Google Forms to create a survey to share with our audience because it is an online platform that can be accessible anywhere at any time. It also allows participants to save their answers automatically, thus being more convenient for them. Additionally, our team members can collaborate easily as it allows us to edit the form together. 

Here are our questions in the Google Form:  

https://forms.gle/vvfDcQXEVH3kFaPt5

We chose these questions because we were interested in understanding if our target audience could decode and interpret our music video with our intended message. Asking them additional questions on the digipak/album covers lets us know which images appealed the most to our audience. Moreover, considering their suggestions for social media posts would likely increase our chances at engaging our audience. We included members of our target demographic (young Indonesian women and teenagers) in the screen test to ensure that the feedback we receive is appropriate.

Finding people for the screen test was easy because we were already familiar with a lot of people who are part of our target audience. We also initially only needed 4 people from our school to help us with our feedback but we decided to ask 2 more Indonesian people from outside our school and outside Bali as we intend our target audience to include young women from all over Indonesia.

Here are the drafts that we showed audiences for the screen test: 

Music video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13zxYsOspH_jBtg38i4zicwVlhZIFl3-V/view?usp=sharing 

Digipak (Album Cover):

Here are the results from the audience feedback:

We collected a total of 6 responses (5 females, 1 male with an age range of 17-18)

Respondent 1

Respondent 2

Respondent 3

Respondent 4

Respondent 5

Respondent 6

This feedback allowed us to receive thoughts and opinions from the audiences at a different point of view since we have been solely watching from a producer and editor’s view thus may be biased towards our work. This fresh perspective will allow us to improve based on the critique we have received. From the feedback, we learned what worked well and what could be changed. Firstly, our audiences captured and interpreted the persona of the star actor well, seeing that they described her as someone passionate and determined, just as how we intended her to be. In addition to that, throughout the music video the audiences did understand the storyline quite well though there were confusions in certain parts which may be due to lack of clarity. Furthermore, people such as lower class Indonesians weren’t represented more visually where as a result, a lot of misunderstanding came from this. With this knowledge, it would then help us know effective methods on how to get our audiences to interact and engage with our media products better. 

We are going to change:

Since we did not represent lower income families as well as we had intended, we chose to highlight the themes of a mother-daughter relationship more instead. This decision is because adding more technical elements to highlight the lower class would need us to rework our entire music video and, due to deadlines, we simply do not have the time or resources to do that. Perhaps, we can discuss the star's lower class past through social media posts instead. We also realise that oftentimes, financial struggle is not often something that can often be visually obvious and so we hope that through representing her this way, we can appeal more to individuals in similar situations and be an inspiration to them through making our star more relatable. 

Conclusion:

This screen test was a useful part of our process since we had only provided audiences with a draft rather than the final product, in order to be able to create adjustments, where necessary, based on the feedback we gained. 

This will enable us to cater better to our target audience’s preferences and clear up misunderstood messages. This also helps us broaden our ideas as fresh perspectives help us open up to new possibilities. People had great suggestions for us to consider. Among these were this suggestion. 

We decided that this idea would be nice to apply as mentioned before that we would like to focus more on the mother-daughter relationship. However, minor adjustments to fit our product better will be needed such as, instead of inserting a childhood footage, we decided to just include audio overlapping the music to show the bond between our star and her mom, to add sentimental value. 

Self-Reflection:

Creating this audience feedback was quite a simple task for me as I was tasked on creating the google form with another one of my teammate Aurel while Regine edited the rough draft. I enjoyed reading through the feedbacks as not only was it from the audience's genuine first impression, it also gave my teammates and I ideas on what to change or add through the rough draft that we gave them to see. We had a few of their ideas that we wanted to apply, however due to the limited time and approaching deadline, we had to readjust them according to the resources and the time that we have. In addition to that, because what we lacked was a more accurate representation of our intended social group, lower class families, I think that we could've asked a few other people earlier so that we had more time to make necessary changes.