Pre-Production Survey

I have created a survey that I have issued to a number of people in my year group, keen to find out about their interest in particular types of music. Here is one completed survey;

We designed the survey online through ‘Survey Monkey’ and asked our peers in Sixth Form if they would be willing to fill it out. We didn’t just rely on printing it off and handing it out, we also sent copies online through emails so people could reply interactively with minimal effort. Due to technical problems with our Digitized Facebook page we were unable to upload it on there for our followers to complete, but we contacted them to explain the difficulty and they were willing to complete it by email. Overall we acquired 25 full responses.

This particular example has been filled out by hand by an anonymous student aged between 17/18. The feedback we received was varied which helped us to pinpoint a particular type of style that we’d need to produce to satisfy the demands of our target demographic. We were intrigued by how they usually access and discover new music videos at home, so one of our questions was ‘how do you generally discover and view music videos yourself?’.

Participants in the survey were able to choose more than one from the options available to them. The majority of people listed ‘YouTube’ as their primary source for discovering new music videos, which was what we expected. We planned to create a YouTube channel to share our video prior to the feedback we received as we realised the number of regular users on the website. However, seeing the number of people that also find music videos through Facebook, we felt it was important we uploaded the link to the video on to our page, to inform our followers of it. We also decided we’d do the same by creating a Twitter account for the band and posting the YouTube link on to there too, even though less people would find it according to our survey results. This information is important for us in delivering our music video and making it accessible for all who have access to the internet.

Elsewhere from other questions, we received advice on what sort of story-line we should adopt for the electro-dance genre that our music video comes under. Many people felt that the characters involved (around late teens to early twenties was the expected age range from the majority of our participants) should be seen to enjoying themselves as they would do on a typical Friday/Saturday night. This was a thought of ours too so in tandem with these responses we decided the characters would be seen under the influence of alcohol. Most people felt this was a blueprint for videos in this genre as that was the structure they’d gotten used to seeing from professional videos released in the 21st century. We also tried to acknowledge and implement some of the features that people enjoyed in music videos, e.g ‘party’ atmosphere, but we were unable to cater for everything as it would detract from what we personally wanted to create. Everybody agreed that they would be willing to watch our video once we had completed it, which was encouraging for us before we began producing it.