To what extent was the intended audience a major factor in the creation of your A2 Advanced Production Portfolio?

When creating media texts, the intended audience should always be considered but it is debatable to what extent the intended audience should influence the final product and whether the final product is a reflection of your own ideas or the audience’s ideas, which is risk you take if you are too heavily influenced by your audience and catering to their idea of a good music video instead of your own.

The song that I chose to do my music video for was by one of my favourite bands and was not the kind of thing that would be in the charts today, I decided to choose a song that I like rather than one which was very popular because I would have difficulty creating a piece to go with a song that I personally did not like. Having said that, people would not watch a music video for a song they didn’t like, so the intended audience is decided based on the song, therefore the audience did not play any role whatsoever in choosing my song and it was instead the audience who were chosen when I picked my song.

When it comes to the narrative of my music video, the audience was more influential. During my audience research I found that most people said they were bored with predictable narrative like love stories etc. and they wanted to see something different, this led to my decision to make my music video more conceptual with no real plot. Although I took into account the audiences views on what made a good or bad music video, when it came to coming up with the actual idea I created the concept based on my own ideas and not what my audience had told me which I think is very important when creating an interesting media text because it helps to avoid clichéd ideas which any member of the public could come up with.

The actual constructing and editing stages of the video is probably where I was most influenced by my audience as this is when the final product would be created, and regardless of the fact that the video was my own concept for a song that I personally liked, it is still a music video and still had to be interesting and enjoyable to watch. This meant that I had to think about whether shots were too long or short or whether I had repeated a shot too often or not, I did not however consider these things quite as much as I should have done because I did end up with too much repetition in my work.

In conclusion, the intended audience did not have a huge influence on my work because although the music video is created for an audience, I dictate who that audience is through the choosing of my song and the product I make is still my own work and nobody else’s, so with the exception of the editing stage, the creative process was not heavily influenced by my intended audience.