We decided to use SurveyMonkey to create and host our survey, and to distribute it we posted the link on our Facebook walls and asked our friends to answer it.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8DMGCZC
In total we had 36 respondents, however some responses were simply not done with any kind of seriousness, and so we deleted them so as not to skew our results, leaving 27 responses. We were careful, however, to not simply delete any negative responses, as some were negative but taken seriously.
Our closed and semantic differential questions give us some numeric data to work from, and allow us to gauge opinions and choices which can only be one of a number of options. Our first question was designed essentially to validate that respondents further answers. While we didn't disregard those who said they would not normally listen to similar music, however we took into account a possible bias they may have throughout the rest of the survey. In total, 30.8% said they would normally listen to similar music, the majority - 57.7% - said 'sometimes', and a minority of 11.5% responded 'no'. Overall, this suggests that our survey has effectively reached the music video's target audience, and thus is very useful in our research and planning.
Our third question was a multiple choice, multiple answer question asking which locations the respondent would most expect to see the video set in. This question is especially useful to us as we are still not entirely sure of our location choice. The two most overwhelmingly popular answers were 'beach or seaside' and 'busy town or city', with 48% each. A beach or seaside location is certainly something we'd consider after our Brighton reccie, however a busy town or city may be more problematic as many more issues arise, such as unwanted people ruining the shots, the space we have to film in and potential thieves, although we have not disregarded the idea completely. We also used an 'other' option to allow respondents to include a location we had not considered. We received three potentially useful responses for this - 'Dancefloor', 'Maybe a studio, but one that isn't perfect. A bit used and grungy.' and 'The Pantiles on a really hot day!' - and these are all locations we would consider.
Similarly to location, we asked a multiple choice, multiple answer question of weather and another of tone. For weather, the vast majority of 58.3% selected 'sunny, with 'overcast' second receiving 29.2% of responses. We feel that both could fit the mood of the song, however one 'other' answer interested us - 'Overcast to start, that way the coloured top will stand out more but then towards the end you want it to be sunny when there are more coloured tops.' This may be something to look into, however since we cannot control the weather it may be difficult to implement.
For our mood question, three choices stood out as the most popular. 'Light-hearted', with 63.0%, 'meaningful', with 40.7%, and 'humorous', with 29.6%. We were trying to decide essentially how serious we make the narrative feel, and whether to attempt adding humour. We didn't expect 'meaningful' to gain such a high percentage, as our original idea is quite light-hearted. It may be something to consider, however.
In our fourth question we asked a multiple choice, single answer question on whether the respondent most picture the video as performance-based, narrative-based, concept-based, narrative & performance or concept & performance. Many previous suggestions had been to add more narrative fuzz to our concept and turn it into less of a rigid narrative, however the majority of answers were for 'narrative & performance' with 40.7%, and 'narrative' with 25.9%. In spite of this, we are keen to turn the video into less of a rigid narrative, but still essentially a story.
Our key question in the survey was a semantic differential question to gauge how much our target audience liked our concept so far. We included our treatment in the question and asked respondents to rate it from 1 (very bad) to 10 (very good). The mean rating overall was 7.19, with one person selecting 10, and our lowest rating being 3, which two people chose. The mode was by far and away 7, with 44.4% of responses. This suggests to us that our audience generally thinks our concept is good.
In order to expand on our key question, the following question was open and simply asked what the respondent might do to improve our idea. From this we received many intriguing ideas as well as useful feedback from the 21 who responded. The majority of those who voted below 5 in the previous question said that our concept was 'cheesy', 'stereotypical', 'basic' and 'cliché' It was partly for these reasons that we want to move away from a rigid narrative. Our positive responses had a huge variety of feedback and suggestions, here are some examples:
'Maybe the one person in bright coloured tops can make everyone else end up with coloured tops. That way it becomes a parade of people, a parade of coloured tops/punk rock T-shirts.'
'Maybe having the band member as the main character so that the audience can follow him through the video so that it doesn't get too confusing and the film has continuity.'
'Maybe have all the colours in the video faded out a bit except the crazy T-shirt.'
'My first thought was that I thought the concept was related too much to the lyrics of the song. Then I realised I didn't understand the lyrics. Something involving time sped up vs time slowed down could be quite cool.'
Our other two open-ended questions were more general. Our first was simply to ask the respondent to write down any images or ideas which immediately came to mind while listening to the song. These often included more general ideas about the video as a whole - tone, style, colour, etc. An example of a couple of responses:
'Pretty much just imagine the sense of a person travelling in a city at night, perhaps with t-shirts lighting up?'
'Smoke, fire, goodbye, running, air, guitar cus, chorus is ambiguous, therefore you could interpret it openly, probably romantic. ambient, chilled atmosphere - outside on a sunny day, performance probably outside, lots of band shots doing lots of fun things.'
Similarly, our final question simply asked for any closing comments, suggestions or advice. This allowed the respondent to add in any thoughts they believed to be useful but weren't asked for at any other part of the survey. These included answers such as:
'Make sure that actual video quality is as high as you can do it, really effects overall video.'
'Take influence from the LMFAO im sexy and i know it music video.'
As well as general wishes of good luck and encouragement like 'I have every faith that you will pull this off with a truly imaginative performance.'
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