Questionnaire Results and Team Meeting

Today we met up in our groups and looked into each results and tried to pick up on what similarities there were between Music, Film and Gaming in apps. Our focus on apps was due to the question that was proposed, it was briefed by ONTECA who were a games app company so focusing on this market was of more use to them.

After looking at our results we found a lot of similarities in the way people had answered, they had only a few different views but mostly the same. Something we did pick up on though whilst browsing through apps was the amount of advertising within the product and how frustrating it could be, we talked about how this could ultimately make somebodies mind on choosing which app to go for and how it can influence a consumers decision making.

Below are the results for the Questionnaire I previously handed out.

Questionnaire for Music

 

1.       How often do you listen to music?

 

Daily - 14 - 93%                  Weekly - 1 - 7%                 Monthly - 0                         Yearly - 0

 

2.       What device do you listen to your music on?

 

Mobile Phone – 8 - 53%    iPod/MP3 player – 4 – 27%         Tablet – 3 – 20%          Other - 0

 

3.       Do you find it easy to acquire songs?

 

Yes – 9 – 60%                     No – 6 - 40%

 

4.       Do you pay for your songs?

 

Yes – 4 – 27%                     No – 10 – 67%                    Sometimes - 1 – 6%

 

5.       Do you feel that downloading/listening via an app is easier than on computers etc.?

 

Yes – 3 – 20%                     No – 2 – 13%                      Equally as easy – 10 – 67%

 

6.       Do you ever have any problems you may usually have using an internet source (e.g. Buffering)?

 

Yes – 4 – 27%                     No – 11 – 73%

 

7.       Do you feel that there could be an improvement within the music app world?

 

Yes – 10 – 67%                   No – 5 – 33%

 

Yes - Explanations felt that there was only iTunes that had a good marketplace for music, however it was expensive and some people were unprepared to pay that money and downloaded apps that allowed users to convert music videos from YouTube.

 

No – Most participants that said no rarely used the apps for music, rather uploading their music onto the device via computer. Only 2 people said they were happy with the main app to acquire music from their device.

Final Task Research

In previous weeks leading up to creating our prezi and presenting it, we have been put into ours groups, I have been put into a group with Natasha and Drew, Natasha I have already previously worked with on other group tasks and Drew I haven't, so I think as a group we can come up with some good ideas and work well. We were given the 2nd of the 3 questions from Monsteca, I would have preferred the 3rd question but I still felt I had a lot to offer on this question.

We have already met in a group and made some decisions in the way we would approach the research, we would look at advertising in the 3 types of media; Music, Film and Branding. We approached it in this way so that we don't miss anything out and can answer the questions asked in as much detail as possible and get different approaches on advertising from 3 different platforms. This will enable us to do individual research and then coallate that our research to answer the question.

My focus was on music and I wanted to look particularly at iTunes, Spotify and Beatport, which are all different ways in which you can buy music, and in which have been advertised on different platforms AND advertise on they're own website. I thought Spotify would be important in my research as it offers a freemium service, and uses adverts well to make money, I also would like to like to see how music company's simplify their companies to keep up with new media such as apps. We created Questionnaires first off using our experiences from the work we had previously done, and I have already had a few results come back from questionnaires and discussed them with my team. (below is the questionnaire)
It will be interesting to see what results i get from the questionnaire and what is noticeable when checking the results, and to see whether the music results match to the film results, so far i think the research is going well and look forward to gathering more.

Questionnaire

1.       How often do you listen to music?

 

Daily                                      Weekly                                 Monthly                               Yearly

 

2.       What device do you listen to your music on?

 

Mobile Phone       iPod/MP3 player          Tablet        Other (please specify) ____________

 

3.       Do you find it easy to acquire songs?

 

Yes                         No

 

4.       Do you pay for your songs?

 

Yes                         No                          Sometimes

 

5.       Do you feel that downloading/listening via an app is easier than on computers etc.?

 

Yes                         No                          Equally as easy

 

6.       Do you ever have any problems you may usually have using an internet source (e.g. Buffering)?

 

Yes                         No

 

7.       Do you feel that there could be an improvement within the music app world?

 

Yes                         No

Qualitative Research

Following up on our Quantitative research we were asked in our groups to gather some Qualitative data using the Questionnaires we had handed out. I was looking forward to this as our group had already noticed something different in the way people filled in our questionnaires. So we looked into the 2 questions that had baffled us a little bit;
Is it important to stay close to home whilst attending university?
Does it have any effect on your decision to choose a university if the city has a lot more to offer than others?

So we created a ladder of choices in which we offered a lot of big named universities, in order to see what city, people who filled our questionnaire in wanted to attend the university of. We gather information from somebody who had left home to come to Liverpool to study and somebody who already lived in Liverpool who chose to attend the local university.

 

 

The participant simply had to place the university they would most want to attend with their favourite being on top of the ladder and their least favourite being at the foot of the ladder. The choices we gave the participants was; Liverpool Universities, Dublin Universities, Sheffield Universities, Newcastle Universities, Glasgow Universities, Manchester Universities, Birmingham Universities and London Universities.

 

We weren't very surprised in the results we received when our participant who had moved to Liverpool's top choice was Liverpool, however when we asked Rebecca (Our student from Liverpool) she had some surprising results:

 

Our results shown that Liverpool was actually her 3rd choice of university, so when we asked Rebecca why she eventually chose not to study in Newcastle or Dublin, she said it would be too big of a move to leave home, and when asked why the cities were in this specific order, both participants answers were similar, they weren't too bothered by living costs or distance from the university, their decisions were purely based on the reputation of the city and the cities nightlife, which also showed i can no longer defend fellow students about their reputation! They are only interested in alcohol!

 

But I did learn a lot about the power of Qualitative research and how important it can be to people using it, like if a university were to take note of my studies, they could advertise a night out for freshers when holding an open day? I don't know its interesting to look at and think just how you could use this type of research to gather information.

Nine Lives Media (Question 3)

For our 3rd and final question we were visited by a representative of Nine Lives Media.

The question we were asked was;
Which are the three most successful ever examples of cross platform television programming, how did viewers participate and most importantly, what did they gain from the experience? (I would anticipate answers such as the London Olympics/Paralympics & Embarrassing Bodies)

This I feel was similar to the first question, in terms of research due to it being largely about audience participation, but a totally different question to answer. I was also very confident about this question, as I felt I had a lot to offer Nine Lives Media as a fan of the types of documentaries they had produced and a fan of tv such as the Olympics and Embarrassing Bodies, so I think this question suits me a lot more than the previous 2, I'm quite eager to get going with this one actually and want to research into cross platform television.

ONTECA (Question 2)

For our second of the 3 questions we were visited by a representative from ONTECA, an company that creates free apps for smart phones.

The question we were asked was:
What new models are there for selling media? When people download so much media freely, what are people willing to pay for and how? What are and what can we learn from the best monetization mechanics for Freemium games on mobile?

After we were presented with this question I had a very good understanding of what the representative wanted from us, and I have a good knowledge of apps, as a user. I thought however it would be hard to present 15 minutes worth of presentation to show, as I think the app market is fairly new to the world and people have already thought of most ways to advertise their apps, there are still a lot of obvious advertising techniques that can be used for apps that have been used for other media, it would be interesting to research this question and I think I could do well with up to a certain extent but then struggle slightly with my presentation, so far I think the 1st question would be better for me, but this question is very do-able.

Digital Fiction Factory (Question 1)

Today we were set our first of 3 questions, and were visited by a representative from Digital Fiction Factory.

The question we were asked was;

The Internet, social media and other open systems have allowed for user generated content (UGC), crowd-sourcing and other forms of audience participation to prevail in digital media. But how do we translate these features into storytelling experiences, without treading on the toes of the author?

 

This presentation was about audience participation and i felt that this would be a good question for me to answer, I was very intrigued by the way how Lime Pictures and Conker Media to create storylines within storylines, and how the audience could control what would happen next, I hadnt seen much of this before and didnt think i had ever been involved in something like this, but at the same time i knew i may have been part of this via a social network or on YouTube without even noticing. I do have some ideas for this question and think it would be interesting to research it but there are still 2 questions to come so although i feel quite confident with this question, but we will see ...

Quantative Questionnaires

We were asked in groups to hand out Questionnaires for this lecture that would help out the university in order for the university to see what criteria students would look at before making their final choice in attending a university.

This is one of our questionnaires we handed out that was returned filled in with some feedback written on it. We asked quite a range of questions that we could get feedback from and which we could go off from here, we then gathered all our filled in questionnaires and listed our answers.

Above are the results that we gathered, in our group we were very interested in the results we gained, especially with questions 1 and 5. Because we thought that starting something new in a familiar place may be easier for students, but it was the opposite, people were ready to go completely out of their comfort zones just to be part of something bigger and better. We knew that this would be good to gather some Qualitative data on and I'm looking forward do doing so hopefully next week in our lecture.

Quantative and Qualatative Research

In our first lecture for Applied media research, we learnt about Quantitative Research, which was a useful way of gathering information from a wide audience.

There were 5 types of Quantitative Research Techniques;
- Online Surveys
- Questionnaires
- Voting Polls
- Telephone Surveys
- Census

I learned than this was a way of gathering research from a big group of people, and that your answers couldn't gather a detailed answer, as with the questions you would see within a Quantitative questionnaire, the answering criteria would be limited and you could give reasoning to your answers, so this type of research would be best suited to brands to see if consumers thought their product worked. e.g. on hair product advertisements it often says something like "90% of users said they noticed visible differences". This was Quantitative Research.

I had already created questionnaires previously in lower education so I was already aware of how useful this type of research could be.

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We also learned about Qualitative Research which was completely different method of gathering data, this would consist of more broadened answers that would relate to something much much specific, generating a much more detailed answer.

This for me was a useful way of getting an evaluation on something you have previously researched, this could be used to gather key points in conclusive research. e.g. if you have previously gave out Quantitative questionnaires, and you received an answer that was of interest of you and you wanted to further investigate why people had chose a certain answer, you would then ask another series of questions that was concentrated around that previous question, this is Qualitative Research.

I had never had any previous experience with Qualatitive research but felt I could learn alot from it, and would benefit in the future from gathering this sort of data.

Finito!

After my 1st year in MPS at JMU I am more than excited at the prospect of next year. I have took alot on board in my 1st year and broadened my knowledge alot, learning various creativity techniques and using new softwares such as; Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop and AVID Media centre. I cant wait to see what the new media building has to offer and can only hope it has as much to offer me as the Screen School has. I am also very happy with my progress made grade-wise as well, getting a lot of 2.1's and 2.2's giving me a great starting point to advance next year.

My strong point throughout both semesters has been in within the Production practice module, getting only 2.1's and 2.2's. I have thoroughly enjoyed all the modules but this module in particular has allowed me to be most creative and give me the chance to make my own films or movies with the right equipment and softwares.

I have also worked in various groups over the semesters being put in with both friends and strangers and have learned alot about myself in the way that i work within a team, i gained an inner confidence when speaking expressivley with a group and enjoyed in particular a lecture in which we used De Bono's 6 thinking hats, this taught me a lot and shown me its not wrong to correct or dismiss peoples ideas, there is just a way to go about it so you dont knock someones confidence.

Overall this year in JMU has been a fantastic experience and a learning curve, it has opened  up so many new opportunities for me and helped me progress toward getting a job in the film/tv industry.

Museum Presented

After presenting our musuem exhibit i feel very happy with the progress made and content at the idea of our exhibit. we woorked brilliantly as a team and created what would make a convincing exhibit, we were also able to gather all the evidence needed to prove it was possible and presented clearly enough that when we asked if anyone had any questions at the end everybody seemed to know where we was.

Online Portfolio

When given the task to create my own website as an online portfolio I was excited by the prospect of having my own portfolio to showcase my work. I set out wanting to create a very simple website, with an almost “in your face” look to it, in order to grab the audience’s attention, as this was a website in which I had to boast my past and present pieces of work, such as video’s and other media pieces such as magazines, radio clips etc. Whilst giving a small insight into myself rather than be all about me.

I began researching other websites of celebrities and other Media related personnel; this gave me a good starting point, inspiring me to make decisions as simple as whether or not to use a drop down menu on the start page or whether there should be a picture of myself, getting a lot of good ideas from some website templates, I decided early on, I wanted the front page of my website to bet very simple changing my mind from bright colours to black and white, with 1 focal image with links into sections of my website e.g. About me, Links etc.

I found that out of all of the websites I had looked at, David Giles photography had the look I was going for and had a lot of detail in the writing and the circled images, however I thought maybe using the images as a background but with no colour would look a lot better.

I think choosing to continuously using this backdrop on the 4 links however takes away the effect that it has on the home page, if I were to do it again I think using a simple black background would have been a lot more effective as I had to use black text on some parts as the white text didn’t work on certain parts of the backdrop. I also think the experience of creating this website has taught me alot and is a very useful thing to know as a media student.

Museum Exhibit

For Semester 2 we had to make a museum exhibit totally from scratch, in our group (Me, Nick Deas and Michael Shiells) our chosen subject was Football Fans, as we mutually agreed this would be a good idea as we could put ourselves in the customers shoes, being football fans ourselves. We didnt really attend many museum exhibits though, so we decided as a group to go to; Musuem of Liverpool, the Maritime Museum and the Liverpool FC museum to do some research into what you might expect from a 'museum experience' whilst researching these musuems we came across an exhibit in the Museum of Liverpool called 'Kicking and Screaming'

"Kicking and Screaming is a short film which describes the unique rivalry and success of Everton and Liverpool football clubs. The film takes the visitor on an exciting and emotive journey through the dramatic history of football in Liverpool, a sport that represents the spirit, attitude and identity of the city. The film features two boys, Liverpool fan TJ and Everton fan Charlie, who discuss some of the momentous events that have shaped their teams."






This was good to see as it gave us a lot of new ideas as to what we could base our exhibit around eventually playing a huge part in our finished project.

Character Identity

We had to create a character using only social networking sights, that would look convincing to others who would view it. This would be a challenge as often enough people see a friend request off somebody whom they have never heard of an decline due to not being entirely convincing, so we needed a back story that people would believe. We created Mark Hepburn, a middle aged writer who was new to the social networking world and spent 90% of his time at home with his laptop. This was a tough task in my opinion because as the weeks went on its hard to put yourself entirely in someone else's shoes, i found myself writing a status but before publishing it, re-typing it 5-6 times using a different vocabulary each time.

The highlight of Mark Hepburn's short life was when we actually had one of our friends exchanging messages with him, talking about everyday things. This was a big confidence boost as we were doing what we set out to do, we were convincing every day people that 'WE' were Mark Hepburn.

Factual Short

Our final project for production practice was to create a film about an interesting subject which was based around a character with an interesting story. As a group we began brainstorming thinking about what we could do, and one of the girls proposed we should do it around hairdressers and the relationship between a hairdresser and a customer, which we all agreed would work, but when discussing our idea with Corin we all agreed the idea was a bit bland, and we needed to introduce something dramatic into it, Corin then proposed that we got maybe an Alopecia patient to surround our original idea around her/him, that was it would be a bit more entertaining to the viewer, after discussing in a team we agreed this was the best solution and began looking for a subject.

After a week of looking we had 2 subjects who agreed to be filmed; Jane, who was a current Alopecia sufferer who agreed to be filmed at her home address and Vivienne, a salon owner who would allow us to shoot in her salon, which was perfect as we could get a lot of stock footage to cut in between shots and link interviews together. We had no trouble with the 2 interviewee's and they were very co-operative when filming and spoke confidently on camera, and we were not ready to start editing. Folloeing our rough cut Corin gave us some useful feedback, saying we needed to get a bit more of a background on what Alopecia is.

We then filmed Dr. David Bell, a doctor who had previously dealt with Alopecia patients and had agreed to be filmed and talk about Alopecia more in dept. When we came to our final edit we thought this worked really well and the shots we got of our Doctor sewn really well into existing clips.

Its Liverpool

Its Liverpool is a film competition in which Liverpool as a city would be advertised and for Production practice our tutors thought this would be a brilliant opportunity to work on filming. I loved the concept of this idea but i felt that everybodys videos would be very similar, advertising the same things over and over, so we needed to create ours to make sure ours would be better through the camera angles and movement and of course the editing. The video also had to include a time lapse feature within it so with this being new to us we needed to know what we were filming as soon as possible. We chose to focus these Liverpool representatives:

Liver Buildings
The Musuem of Liverpool
Liverpool One
Echo Arena
Albert Dock

As all of our group were from Liverpool we felt we had an advantage, we knew where some places had brilliant views of these areas and buildings and we set off immedietly to begin filming. We asked permission from a restaurant called Matou, if we could film off their balcony getting us various brilliant shots of both the musuem and the liver buildings, getting the time lapse shots out of the way already by getting the whole musuem with people walking around it.

 

 

We had our starting point and then went along the docks before going to the echo arena to film the last bit before it went dark, but on the spot we decided we could add a theme to the film as maybe 'A Day and Night in Liverpool' catching the sun going down, so we got another time lapse of the clouds coming over the echo arena in case we wanted to follow through on this and waiting to see what our rough cut would present us wit. After our rough edit we found we were very short on our clips, so we went ahead with the theme we thought would look good getting night time shots of Liverpool before making our final edit. Our final edit came out brilliantly and we had a very atmosperhic song over it called 'I am God' which went hand in hand with the footage. I was extremely proud with our final product as it just came together in the end and worked out brilliantly through the shots and editing, which is exactly what we wanted to happen.

Google Maps

I had always been familiar to google maps in trying to find a location, if i was booking a hotel or looking for an address, but i had never used it in order to create a story. We were set into random groups of 4/5 people and given a location, ours was St. James' Cemetary, a familiar place for me as it was where we filmed for People on the Move. Anyway, we began brainstorming on ideas as to what we could do for this and after alot of ideas we wanted to base in on somebody who had been buried within the gardens. so we began researching people who were buried there and found a brilliant subject, "Sergeant Arthur Herbert Lindsay Richardson V.C. The first winner of the Victoria Cross" We thought this was a very historic man and done alot of research into him and found alot about his life. Perfect. We then set our route up on Google maps visiting the places he visited during his life before finishing with the cemetary. After presenting it to the class we got some really good feedback about how interesting his life was so all in all i was happy with our chosen subject and how his story was well known enough for us to gather the information on him.