Focus Group and Evaluation

This is my focus group and we actually got quite a bit of feedback and it was very helpful to us. It allowed us to break down our idea and find out what people thought was good and bad about it. Overall I think the focus group was actually a success, as we got a lot of feedback from our peers and they gave helpful constructive criticism.

When everyone first heard the song, they all said they imagined an idea that was quite “Chilled & jazzy”. This was right at the beginning of the video and they had already said something that was not what my partner and I were thinking of. They then did however warm up to the idea of a girl walking down the street with different costumes as Tanya said “As long as you make it a bit jazzy I guess”. What was really successful is that they expressed their opinions quite well, as they even gave us an insight of what the character should look like in specific detail: “Side parting, hair all down one side”.

The strengths that they said weren’t that many but I feel as if this is a good thing as it will help us a lot when it comes to developing our idea and what we should do as this feedback is from people that are within the age range of our target audience. Also I personally think this song appeals more too mostly females and in the focus group you can denote that it consists of only girls. However this can also be seen as a problem as there are no males the feedback we got cannot be representative of all the males that would listen to their song and we haven’t got any opinions of what males think of it.

The strengths they did say was that our idea can work if we slow it down and make it more chilled and another strength is that they agreed that some effects would work; adding filters but even when they said that they didn’t agree with the filters that my partner had said to use. Dami specifically said to add a blue filter. The girls wanted to go for more of a laid back video where there was rain and Tanya even said maybe a girl and a boy. To me this came off as quite a depressing video but it has made us think about how we can alter our idea and how we can compromise. They also agreed with one idea that we had which was getting her ready at the beginning of the video and then walking out to go somewhere when the tempo gets faster. This supports us and makes it a likely decision for us to actually do that scene of getting ready at the beginning.

However majority of the video was them voicing their opinions of what they think we should do. Ama suggested an idea of having a character walking down the street in a gown with red lipstick and a masquerade mask on and going to a party. This is a very different idea to our original idea of having it quite funky and having a girl changing costumes. It made us see the song in a different light.

They also then moved onto giving ideas of maybe the whole video should be her getting ready as a lot of R&B songs do this. A thing that was very well done is that they gave examples such as Eunice giving the example of Leona Lewis or even Jada talking about Diamond rings by Chipmunk. This will give us more to look at for inspiration which can influence our idea more. They also gave us feedback on our locations and gave us ideas of where to film. They were quite committed to their jazz idea so they said to film in a jazz bar and if we were not allowed in then we can improvise and use the school hall as it has the props we need. This was quite helpful but I do not think we will be moving into the direction of going very jazzy.

The weaknesses were the fact that they were against masks and dancing but this wasn’t a huge thing as we were quite sceptical on those ideas anyways so it will be easy to just get over the idea. Overall there was a lot of feedback to take in and it was quite helpful as I think it has developed our idea to add a slight narrative to the video to make it more interesting and calmoing down with the upbeat ideas that we have.