Here is our finished project, a music video to "Summer Of 69" by Bryan Adams. I'm very happy with how the video turned out and thoroughly enjoyed working on the piece.
Monday, 11 February 2013
Friday, 18 January 2013
Thursday, 17 January 2013
Evaluation question 3: What have you learned from your audiencefeedback?
The first time audience feedback had an influence on our work was during the target audience research, where we developed a questionnaire and interviewed members of our chosen target audience (white men aged 17 and over) about what they like to see in a video from the rock genre.
The feedback we received after the pitch was incredibly useful as it really helped shape the video, for example one of the key images in the video is a guitar however the actor we cast as the singer at the time couldn't play the guitar. The feedback session helped here as after the pitch someone suggested we keep the top of the guitar out of shot, that way the audience wouldn't see that the actor was playing the wrong chords.
However after watching the video during the construction stage of the video the feedback we received was that hiding the top of the guitar worked on close ups but not on the wider shots meaning that on the whole the guitar work look incredibly unconvincing.
This led to recasting the singer and changing the shape of the story from basing the entire video around the singer, to having the song based around the events in the video shown by the narrative protagonist. Having two distinct main characters also meant we could use interesting and original ways to link the characters. This link became a narrative opening and ending separate from the track itself, the story being that the narrative protagonist is using his past experiences shown in the video to help the singer physically write the song. Linking the characters but us in good stead for the next feedback session, this was because the class felt that the video was becoming repetitive so we were able to use this link and build upon it by having footage of them collaborating on the song become part of the video. This was a good idea as it added lighter moments to the video and prevented repetition. The feedback we received that lead to these changes was to my mind the most important as it provided us with a new shape and direction for the video which is what we stuck with and gave us a good foundation to build towards our finished piece.
After the video was complete I posted it on my Facebook page to gain as much audience feedback as possible for the finished piece. The reason I did this was to market the video to as many members of our target audience as possible and as our target audience our 17 year olds and over using social networking was the best way to reach them as the majority are extremely well connected because of websites such as Facebook.
In terms of feedback for our ancillary tasks, this started with showing the class our first drafts for the digipak.
If we were to do the project again one thing I'd do differently is to hold proper auditions to see if people we want in the video can actually do what we ask to a good standard. This means we'd avoid the problem we had with re-casting and having to re-shoot a large amount of the video.
Finally when we showed the finished video to the class the feedback we received was that:
The idea behind the video was a good one however some of they felt that some of the scenes were their for padding. One that was highlighted was the scenes with the singer on a flight of stairs performing, as the class felt the scenes didn't look right. There were mixed reviews about the narrative opening and ending, as some people really liked them but some thought they were overly cheesey. Overall though I feel they were got a good reception. There were also mixed reviews about the tracking shot showing the band from behind, but again I feel this was well received overall, however the class did say that the lighting on the tracking shot and various other performance shots was too dark. A criticism of the narrative scenes was that the "couples scene" looked awkward and staged, however they enjoyed our use of transitions, in the video particularly in the break up scene.
One thing we learnt was that a popular type of video is a cross over video, containing both performance and narrative aspects. This gave us confidence as were planning to make a cross over video and learning that these videos were popular, meant we could confidently decide what video we were going to make and then focus on making the content of the video as good as possible.
Our next substantial feedback session was when we had a firm idea on what we wanted our video to be and then pitched this idea to the class.
The feedback we received after the pitch was incredibly useful as it really helped shape the video, for example one of the key images in the video is a guitar however the actor we cast as the singer at the time couldn't play the guitar. The feedback session helped here as after the pitch someone suggested we keep the top of the guitar out of shot, that way the audience wouldn't see that the actor was playing the wrong chords.
However after watching the video during the construction stage of the video the feedback we received was that hiding the top of the guitar worked on close ups but not on the wider shots meaning that on the whole the guitar work look incredibly unconvincing.
This led to recasting the singer and changing the shape of the story from basing the entire video around the singer, to having the song based around the events in the video shown by the narrative protagonist. Having two distinct main characters also meant we could use interesting and original ways to link the characters. This link became a narrative opening and ending separate from the track itself, the story being that the narrative protagonist is using his past experiences shown in the video to help the singer physically write the song. Linking the characters but us in good stead for the next feedback session, this was because the class felt that the video was becoming repetitive so we were able to use this link and build upon it by having footage of them collaborating on the song become part of the video. This was a good idea as it added lighter moments to the video and prevented repetition. The feedback we received that lead to these changes was to my mind the most important as it provided us with a new shape and direction for the video which is what we stuck with and gave us a good foundation to build towards our finished piece.
After the video was complete I posted it on my Facebook page to gain as much audience feedback as possible for the finished piece. The reason I did this was to market the video to as many members of our target audience as possible and as our target audience our 17 year olds and over using social networking was the best way to reach them as the majority are extremely well connected because of websites such as Facebook.
In terms of feedback for our ancillary tasks, this started with showing the class our first drafts for the digipak.
The feedback we received was that the class liked our idea to have a photo of the artist as the main image and they also liked how we had the text running down rather than across the front cover. It was here we received arguably our most useful piece of feedback, to market the digipak as a single rather than an entire album so we could include more imagery in the digipak. The reason this was so important was because having it marketed in this way shaped both our ancillary tasks as it gave us lots of still images to work with and allowed us to follow the convention of giving the digipak and magazine advert the same main image.
If we were to do the project again one thing I'd do differently is to hold proper auditions to see if people we want in the video can actually do what we ask to a good standard. This means we'd avoid the problem we had with re-casting and having to re-shoot a large amount of the video.
Finally when we showed the finished video to the class the feedback we received was that:
The idea behind the video was a good one however some of they felt that some of the scenes were their for padding. One that was highlighted was the scenes with the singer on a flight of stairs performing, as the class felt the scenes didn't look right. There were mixed reviews about the narrative opening and ending, as some people really liked them but some thought they were overly cheesey. Overall though I feel they were got a good reception. There were also mixed reviews about the tracking shot showing the band from behind, but again I feel this was well received overall, however the class did say that the lighting on the tracking shot and various other performance shots was too dark. A criticism of the narrative scenes was that the "couples scene" looked awkward and staged, however they enjoyed our use of transitions, in the video particularly in the break up scene.
on the whole the class enjoyed the video and thought it was well done.
Evaluation question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Audio file answer to evaluation question 2
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