Audience Research Results and Evaluation.

Yesterday we carried out our focus group. At the start we gave out questionnaires to the group to fill in, and then showed them a clip from the film 'Balls of Fury' and finally had a small discussion regarding ideas. We found from the questionnaires that the indie genre was very popular wish gives us an idea of the target audience we want to appeal to when making our music video. One of our questions asked if the respondant could think of any music videos which made them laugh and only one music video was suggested between four of them. This shows that what we are attempting to do is very original and probably would stand out from a lot of other music videos. We found that the most popular films with comedy similar to what we are attempting to do were Anchorman, Step Brothers and Superbad. But we found that Balls of Fury was not so popular, but some of the respondants had not seen the film. This means that we may have to carry out the table tennis idea differently to how the film Balls of Fury does it. Included in the questionnaire was a picture from the film of Balls of Fury of two players playing table tennis, all resppondants said they would find this idea funny as it had not been done before in a music video but it had to be executed well. We wanted to find out how the band would be represented if we attempted to make a music video like this. We found that they would be represented as funny, creative, original and credible. This is a very positive thing as these are what we wanted the band to represented as. We found that the most popular comstume idea we came up with was one which consisted of a head band, glasses, t-shirt, shorts and sweatbands round the wrist. We then showed an extract from the film 'Balls of Fury' to see if people found it funny. This extract had a positive response with everyone finding it funny, this shows that our video, executed in the right way, could be amusing and appeal to a wide audience. Finally we carried out a small discussion to finish off the focus group. We put forward the challenge we faced that none of us could play table tennis to a high level and how we could get round this problem. One of the respondants suggested that we put the ball on a piece of string with someone holding it moving it from one side of the table to the other, this would also add to the comedy of the video as it is clearly fake. From the discussion we also found that for the costume it would be best to dress and act as geeky as possible wearing short shorts, skimpy vest, long socks and sweatbands. We proposed the idea to the group of using the school gym as the location to carry out the music video, the response to this was positive as it is quite a run down gym and would add to the comedy of the video. Overall the focus group has helped us to develop our idea and give us an idea of what to leave out and put in, we found that people would find our idea funny and thought it was original, but this is if the video was executed in the right way.