re positive for example Becky Moules said that the documentary was well edited its concise, humorous at times and easy to watch, a very informative documentary about Britain and its love for tea. Other positive comments which people said was that it wouldn’t look out of place on the news and that it was very professional. However, the documentary did not escape criticism. There were many evaluative points which I received on facebook. These included, the narrative was hard to understand, this was justified because we challenged the convention with Janet so that the audience had a break from facts and kept them interested. Someone else said that the music was distracting in the interviews. However, we have since changed this so that there were no lyrics in the music in the interviews or when the voiceover was talking. This was so the voiceover would stand out and so that the lyrics would not distract the audience from the information being said. We also changed some of the parts to instrumentals so that the audience could stay interested. Another comment which I received off facebook was that the microphone was a bit too sensitive on the interview with James Hill, the sociologist. This was an issue which we could not correct as the cameras did not allow you to challenge the microphone gain. We did turn down the volume in his interview when we were in the editing process. Someone also said that the pictures of Britain look out of place but this is ok because they show typical pictures of Britain and this anchors meaning to what the voiceover is saying at the time. We were trying to show stereotypical images of Britain and this gives the audience a break from tea and so keeps them interested. A comment which was said a few time was that the documentary ended suddenly. But this was ok because we did have more footage but we had to cut it short as the documentary could only be five minutes so the ending was forced to be sudden. We did plan out the rest of our documentary in the planning stage so it is meant to continue but we could only produce the first five minutes. Another comment which followed this was that they wanted to see more of the tea room manager as she had some very good points about tea, but as we had to stick to five minutes we could not change this. A final criticism which we got from facebook was of the framing in the voxpops was too square and that we should have changed the height of the camera as the height of the people changed also. However, as we did our vox pops early we had used their answers to create parts of our documentary. Also there were many comical answers and comical people which we spoke to so we did not want to get rid of this footage as they added comedy.As well as putting the documentary on facebook to get audience research we also got people to watch our documentary, view our print advert, listen to our radio advert and then answer a short questionnaire on how we could improve our media products and what they thought of them. Below is a blank copy of the questionnaire which we handed out.
Audience Feedback Questionnaire
1. How would you rate the documentary out of 10? (10 being the highest) ......
2. Did the poster/radio advert make you want to watch the documentary? (Circle yes or no)
Yes/No
3. Did the on-screen graphics help you understand the documentary more?
Yes/No
4. Did you notice the music?
Yes/No
5. How well do you think the various music fitted in with the documentary? (Rate out of 10) ......
6. How do you think this documentary could be improved?
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7. Would you watch our documentary again?
Yes/No
8. Did the print advert catch your attention?
Yes/No
9. How could the printout be improved to make it more noticeable?
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10. Did the radio advert appeal to you?
Yes/No
11. Which media product do you think was most effective? (circle one)
Documentary Print advert Radio advert
12. Do you think the voiceover suited the documentary?
Yes/No
13. Which was your favourite part of the documentary?
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14. Do you have any comments on the editing?
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The results we gained from these questionnaire gave us a lot of information which we can then evaluate.
Question one shows how our documentary was overall popular as 10 out of 15 people rated our documentary ten out of ten.
When we asked our target audience if the radio and print advert make you want to watch the documentary? Twelve people said that yes it does and only three said that it didn’t, this shows that our other ancillary texts were successful. Those three people who said that the other media texts did not make them want to watch the documentary said that it was because the topic did not interest them.
All of our target audience said that the graphics did help them understand the documentary. So this means that we were correct to use them in our documentary.
We asked our target audience if they noticed the music in our documentary and fourteen said yes they did and only one said that they didn’t. This means that overall we were right to find tea related songs because the audience would notice if it was out of place. However, to justify the one person who said that they didn’t notice the music this could have been avoided if we had a constant music bed throughout the documentary. We did have a constant music bed but then we received comment that the lyrics in the songs were distracting from the voiceover and other content. So we should have found some more relevant instrumental music.
In this question you can see how we got more positive answers on the music fitting in with the documentary. However, I do think that this could be improved by the same point as before, by finding relevant instrumental music so that we could have a constant music bed so that the music could play a more important role in our documentary.
Number six in our questionnaire gave us a lot of audience feedback which can be analyzed. The question was how could our documentary be improved, we did receive a few answers saying that it didn’t need to be improved or that they wanted it to be longer as it was very good. However, this was not possible as we had to stick to the strict five minute maximum length. We also received some good critical feedback such as two people said they wanted to see more of Janet, this was an issue in the editing process as we had trouble editing down Janet as she gave all good footage. In the end we had to cut it right down so that we could show some of our other interviews and have a variety of footage. Other comments which we received were that the documentary needed more facts and information on the origins of tea. We did plan to feature some footage on where tea comes from, but when we were editing we realized that we had filmed too much footage so that meant that we had to cut things from our running order.
We asked our target audience if they would watch our documentary again and all of them said that they would, which gives us positive feedback and tells us that our documentary would be successful on television.
The next question was did the documentary make sense to you and there was only one person who said no. This can be justified because we challenged the convention of narrative with Janet in our documentary and we decided to keep coming back to her and to give the audience a break from the factual narrative.
Just over half of the people we asked this question said yes which suggests that it wasn’t a successful advert. However, when we asked them to explain their advert they said that the teapot stands out but the words don’t. When analysing this answer we can see that this keeps in with the print adverts codes and conventions as the image is meant to be the centre of attention and the text is not meant to distract the audience from this. So this feedback is successful as it shows we have kept with the conventions of print adverts.
When we then asked how our print advert could be improved they said that a different font should be used, the words should be clearer and a different coulour should be used. Since we have had this feedback we have changed our print advert so that it does this.
As you can see from our new image on the left we have changed the colour and font of the text and moved it to make it more visible. Also we got told that the words should be bigger than the image to improve it, but we are not going to make this change as it would go against the print advert convention.
This graph again shows that a small percentage thought that our radio advert appealed to them. A reason for this could be that they did not like the music underneath the content, as we used classical music this could mean that the classical music made the documentary look like it was aimed at an older generation.
This graph shows that our target audience thought that our documentary was our best product and this is good because the others are only meant to support it and make others aware of the documentary. So our documentary should be the most affective.
We the asked if our target audience thought that our voiceover was effective and only one person said no and most people gave the feedback that she had a lovely and nice voice. This shows us that we chose the correct voiceover to suit with the documentary.
Our next question asked what they thought the best part of the documentary was and we got a variety of answers from Janet, the bit about Turkey and the opening titles. This showed us that our documentary had a variety of good moments.
Our final question was do you have any comments on the editing?We also got a lot of positive comments like it was good and the opening titles were edited well. However, we also got some good critical comments like it was too fast. We tried to make the docunmentary fast paced though so that it didn’t risk getting boring and so this comment suggests that we have succeeded in this. Also to back this up another comment said that they liked the fast paced editing. Another comment which we got with this question was that the sound volume was inconsistant throughout the documentary and we could have changes this by having all the same levels but it still would be inconsistant because some interviews were louder than others.
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