We did this research in order to find out what are audience is expecting from this video and whether or not there is any specific criteria we needed to meet. We also wanted to see what they thought about our concept and our initial ideas so far.
One of the main problems we have been having with our concept is whether or not to include more characters, so we asked our audience. 60% of people think that we should have extra characters, but when looking at their suggestions we can see it is to have several people to create a party like atmosphere such as seen in her Dog Days and Rabbit Heart videos. These being her most popular videos, the rest have generally been her alone in a studio, with the occasional video having a dance group which is something we definitely did not want from the beginning. For practicality reasons we said from the beginning that we didn’t want a lot of people in it but we didn’t mind having extras. Since our results we are thinking about whether to include other people. Certainly for the scenes in the drama studio and by the bench the actress will be on her own. It is the graveyard and field locations that we could use extras as our audience have suggested, but the idea we have doesn’t necessarily warrant extra people and they may look like they have just been included for the sake of it.
Because our video doesn’t have a narrative as such, it is more concept based we wanted to ask our audience whether or not this would be a problem for them. When asked how necessary do you think it is for the video to have a storyline 80% of people said that it wasn’t particularly necessary and only 10% said that it was vital. Meaning that so long as we do our concept well the audience should have no problems following it.
Our audience also agreed that it wasn’t necessary for them to understand the video so long as it wasn’t entertaining and visually interesting.
Because our main idea for this video was to shoot it in a graveyard, so as to have some link to the lyrics without being too illustrative. We wanted to see if our audience agreed with this location. Our results show that 90% of people feel this is an appropriate location, with the 10% that disagreed saying it was a bit cliché. However, if done effectively I don’t think it will matter.
Other suggestions for locations were fields or woods, of which we have chosen a field as one of our locations. We did consider some woods and visited a couple but then decided on the field location instead. Many of the options people suggested to us involved the place being empty which contradicts what they were saying in the previous questions.
We asked our audience if the use of black and white was suitable to this song, 80% of people agreed that it was, with the people disagreeing suggesting that bright colour should be used instead. What we plan to do with our video is to have elements of black and white like the photographs and possibly the balloons in the graveyard to fit with the gothic elements of the song, however we are not going to shoot our footage in black and white because we don’t think it would be appropriate. We may however consider shooting in a slight sepia tone to fit with the style of Florence. We all feel that bright colours are an important part of Florence and so wanted to consider that in her costume, hair and make up to contrast the gothic surroundings such as the graveyard, a sort of juxtaposition with the visuals.
Our results agree that our main target audience are females and in the 14-20 age bracket as these are the most likely to be interested in watching her music video, even though Florence's music does appeal to a wider and much larger demographic it is those that are likely to use our video for focused viewing that we are interested in.
