Bronwyn's Filmed evaluation

Beth's Filmed Evaluation

Mart's Filmed Evaluation

Wordle art

I used wordle art to crate a word cloud of my evaluation.

 

Mart's Evaluation - Question 3

Question Three: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We gathered feedback on our music video constantly while editing by asking friends and classmates what they thought of different edits. After the music video was finished we had a lesson where we watched every group’s videos and gave feedback with the help of a focus group feedback questionnaire. From the questionnaires we gathered about 15 different opinions and feedback responses for our music video.

I have used Wordle.net to create a 'word cloud' from the replies that we got from the focus group feedback questionnaires. As it shows the most common recurring word was 'suitable' and 'good'. This shows that our music video was successful and the target audience likes our efforts.

Wordle image

The Wordle image shows that the feedback tells us that the video was suitable to the song and kept a good mood of the song, trying to create the right mood of the song was important to us as a group as we interpreted the song as a sort of love song that goes wrong at the end. Through the music video we created a sense of love and a relationship being there between the actors which then split. This idea is something we used on the Digipak, a sense of relationship by being seen together on the front cover, then on the back cover Jenny and Johnny seen separated on the bench.

Seperated on the bench

The actors that played our artists Jenny and Johnny got mentioned for being well cast and appropriate for the roles they were cast in. The ways that we used green screen effects was highlighted as another positive. Many people haven’t realised that green screen was used on the paper burning scene and the green screened picture on the wall at the start of the video. It shows that we did the green screen well if it isn’t noticeable as green screen! Other things that we were praised upon are the amount of shots and the variety of the shots. Even though we only had 2 locations we used different rooms and places in the location. For example, we used around 5 different mini locations in Victoria Park in Ilkeston and 3 different rooms in Beth’s house for the house scenes. This gave us a good amount of shots and locations to work with.

House location



The issues that were raised were some slight issues of lip synching, the lip synching problems are due to one of our actors having long hair and his hair sometimes covered his mouth so the camera couldn’t see what he was singing. On the Wordle image, the word ‘Awkward’ appears when describing our actors. This is something that we agree on as our actors were acting for the first time really in our video so found some of the acting we required embarrassing and slightly awkward. We worked around this issue by filming long sections without them knowing the camera was running to try and get a relaxed less awkward looking performance shot.

Another issue raised was the apparent lack of different shots. In our song Switchblade, there is lots of instrumentals and ‘ah ah’ sections which require performance shots of our actors. Although we had different camera angles in the shots of our actors, these shots looked similar to the audience which was highlighted in the feedback. If we could do those shots again we would move around to different locations within the park to get different backdrops. This would have given the sense of progression in our video.

Moving through locations showed progression

Looking back at our planning stages our music video is different to how we intended it to be. We planned for it to be more narrative than performance but when reviewing our planning stages and looking at how we would film each stage it was agreed that the plan had to be changed as it would be unpractical and difficult to film what we wanted.

I overall agree with the feedback that we received as the general response is that the music video is well made and suitable for the song and the artists. However there is a slight lack of different shots. This issue is understandable as all our shots were bound to look similar as the majority of the video is of the male actor singing and playing a guitar.

Beth's Feedback Wordle Art

In order to gain a general idea of people thoughts on our music video I entered the comments from  the our feedback sheets into Wordle in order to create this word cloud :) I will be using this to help with my evaluation.

Beth's Evaluation - Question 3

Question Three: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We gathered audience feedback throughout the making of our video by showing various scenes and edits to people and asking for their opinions. Mostly we asked people who would be considered our target audience, 18-25 year olds, as we thought this would give us the most accurate view of the general reaction to the video.
We also gathered audience feedback by showing our music video to the class and getting everyone to fill out focus group feedback questionaires. This was a really useful way of gauging audience reaction to our video as everyone in the class comes under our target audience. The feed back questionaires were also good because there was space for people to add comments which was helped us understand the strengths and weaknesses of our music video.
Some of the positive comments we got from our feed back questionaires were;
- Suitable performance
- Good variety of shots
- Good lighting
- Good storyline
- Works well with the song
- Easy to watch
- Effects were really well done
- Actors matched the look
- Shots were steady and framed well
- Location fit with the genre

The feed back was generally very positive and almost everyone seemed to have a similar oppinion. Almost unanimously our audience decided that the photograph burning scene was the best bit. We were really pleased with the way this shot turned out so we were glad that other people liked it as well :)



Photo burning scene from our music video



Our feedback told us that people also enjoyed the relationship storyline in our video and the use of props.

Relationship storyline in our video <3

Some of the concerns that people raised over our music video are as follows;

- Slight lip synching issue (possibly because of the actors hair covering their faces in some shots)

- Shorter or greater variety of shots needed

- Actors looked more "metal" - didn't suit genre

- More emotive actors

- More close ups would have been better

We think that these are all justified concerns and are valuble points for us to improve on in the future.

As I have said, we found this method of getting feedback very useful. However, it does have it's problems as some people oppinions of the video may be biased if they, for example, don't like the song/artist or if it is not their prefered style of music.

All the same, we agree with most of our feedback and are really pleased with the reception our video recieved :)

Beth's Evaluation Question 2

2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

We think the combination of our three products (music video, web page and digi pack) works really well together as we kept the same themes running continuously throughout all of them and kept a lot of the same motifs so they all related to each other.

For example, our three products relate together as we used some of the same imagery and themes which you can see below:

The famous alphabet spaggetti scene in our music video :)





Image of the spaghetti on our disc in the digi pack design.



Spaghetti image on our web page

As you can see we used the same image of the spaghetti plate in our music video, web page and digi pack which links the three of them together and makes them recognisable as products of the same artist.  We decided to use the spaghetti image as we thought that it fit with the fun, quirky image of our band and it also illustrated some of the lyrics from our song ("You used to dine out on a dollar...") Spaghetti on toast is generally regarded as a cheap meal but here it has a cute twist so we thought it would be a fun and visually interesting way to interpret the lyrics. It also reflects the narrative of our video as spelling out names in spaghetti is the kind of silly, romantic gestures people make in the fun, early days of relationships which we were trying to show in our video.

Images of our actors as Jenny&Johnny taken from our music video shoot and used on the front and back covers of our digi pack.

Images of our actors as Jenny&Johnny taken from our music video shoot and used on the web page.

Our actors as Jenny&Johnny in our music video

We used similar images of our actors as Jenny&Johnny throughout our three products. We did this because we wanted our two ancillary products, the web page and digi pack, to reflect our main product, the music video. We thik we did this very effectively, particularly between the music video and the digi pack as the images on the front and back covers of the digi pack reflects the narrative of our music video. In our music video we see the story of a couple, Jenny&Johnny, who are initially very happy together but their relationship gradually breaks down throughout the video. This story is reflected on our digi pack as on the front cover the couple are sitting together on the bench which features in our video, looking very close and happy together, then, on the back cover, they are sitting far away from each other on the same bench and look very distant.

Another theme that ran through both our music video and digi pack was photographs.

Polaroid style photos on our digi pack

Burning photographs - Green scene effect used in our music video

We decided to use the polaroid effect on our digi pack because we thought that it fit in with Jenny & Johnny's slightly vintage image and it fit in with our video. We decided to include the green screen photographs in our video because they reflect the charecters "happier memories" and the narrative of the song and video. The burning of the photographs is supposed to show the break up of the two characters in the video in a way which would be fairly obvious to anyone watching it. We decided to include this visual clue as, because it is a music video, there is no dialogue between the characters to explain this.



Beth's Evaluation Question 1 - Web Page

1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Web Page

We think our web page fits well for our artist as we used their signature colours to create it (red, black & blue) We used many of the conventions of alt/indie bands web pages but the page we created is actually very different to Jenny & Johnny's web page.

This is the webpage we created.

http://jennyandjohnnymusic.com/

This is a link to Johnny and Jenny's web page.

As you can see Johnny and Jenny's web page is more of a blog and the colours are very plain, although the website is done entirely in their signature colours. We thought that their website was a little too plain and, frankly, boring, so when we did ours we decided we wanted it to a lot more colourful! We stuck with the theme of using the red, blue, black and white by altering one of our pictures in photo shop to these colours and using it as a theme throughout the rest of the page. We also included images of our band members on the page which is a conventional for this type of site and which Jenny&Johnny's page lacks. We did use Jenny and Johnny's blog idea a little when we included the news feed and twitter feed on our page. We also included links to twitter and facebook pages. Most bands now use twitter and facebook as they are now a vital marketing tool so we thought that it was really important to include these on our page.

https://www.facebook.com/JennyAndJohnny

This is a link to Jenny&Johnny's Facebook page.

Beth's Evaluation Question 1 - Digipack

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Digipack

We think our digi pack fits well with both our song and artist. However, in many ways it is quite different to Jenny and Johnny's CD cover and other CD covers of our genre (Alt/Indie).



Front and back cover of our digi pack







Inside cover and disc of our digi pack





Jenny & Johnny's CD cover ("I'm Having Fun Now")

Our digi pack uses the conventions of alt/indie videos because it has a picture of the band on the cover. CD covers are supposed to advertise the band which is why it is important to have this picture on their. Jenny&Johnny's album cover also has a picture of them on it. Also, like on the Jenny&Johnny cover, our actors are close together on the cover which once again markets them based on their relationship. However, the colouring on the two covers is very different. On our digi pack we used lost of very bright, vibrant colours as we wanted it to stand out and have a very quirky, cartoon type look to it whereas Jenny&Johnny's CD cover is very dark. Their image is shown through a red filter which means the entire image is only in red and black. Jenny&Johnny's CD cover seems to be conventional of the genre as it is simular to other covers from this genre such as Belle & Sebastian's "If Your Feeling Sinister."

"If Your Feeling Sinister" - Belle and Sebastian

Because of this, our digi pack seems to challenge the conventions of our genre. This is because we based our digipack more on our music video rather than conventions.

Beth's Evaluation Question 1 - Music Video

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Music Video

In the music video that we created for Jenny & Johnny's "Switchblade" I think we used a lot of the conventions of music videos in generally and conventions of indie/folk/alternative muic videos specifically. We didn't want to stray too far from these conventions as, obviously, our product needed to be recognisable as a music video and be suitable for the genre of our chosen artist.

As the embedding of Johnny and Jenny's other music video for the song "Big Wave" is disabled I have posted the link below:

Big Wave - Johnny&Jenny

There are many simularities between this music video and our own. One of these simularities is the fact that both videos feature a love story theme which reflects Johnny&Jenny's real life relationship.



Johnny & Jenny Love Story in our Switchblade video



Jenny & Johnny Love Story in their Big Wave video



We thought that this was an important element to include in our music video as when we did our research on Jenny & Johnny we found that they are generally marketed based on their relationship and it plays a big part in their overall image. Alternative love stories are also a major convention of indie/alt music videos.



As you can see in this picture, Jenny & Johnny's main "selling point" is usually their personal relationship.



Another way in which our music video uses the conventions of alt/indie music videos is the theme of rebellion that runs through most videos of this kind. When we did or research we discovered that most alt/indie videos feature some kind of alternative life styles which generally involves either sex, drugs, alcohol or all of the above.



In Johnny & Jenny's video for "Big Wave" there were some slightly sexual scenes

  




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However, as we didn't want to make our actors too uncomfortable we opted for alcohol instead :)

We also tried to use the conventions for these types of music videos when it came to both costume and location for our video.

Alt/indie artists generally have a very laid back, casual style with a slightly quirky twist. Johnny and Jenny are no exception to this. Their image is very casual but often has a subtle 50's influence.

 Johnny and Jenny - Casual style with a 50's twist in the "Big Wave" video

Casual style with a slightly vintage twist in our Switchblade video

However, unlike Jenny & Johnny, our actors had the great British weather to contend with and some of their style had to be sacrificed in order to keep warm! Still, I think our costume choices work well with the video and bring a little English charm to Johnny and Jenny's sunny Californian look :)

 The locations in alt/indie music videos is generally very naturalistic and outdoor so we decided to include this in our video by using the very visually affective Victoria Park.

Naturalistic locations in Jenny & Johnny's "Big Wave"

 Victoria Park archway in our "Switchblade" video



We also used conventions of music videos in general when it came to the technical aspects of our video, for example:
In music video's we expect to the band members, often with close up shots of them.

Close up shot of Jenny & Johnny in the "Big Wave" video



Our actors as Johnny and Jenny in our Switchblade video

Overall, I think we stuck pretty closely to the conventions for alt/indie videos and used a lot of our artists style. I think this makes our video suitable for the genre, the artist and the song. However, as Johnny and Jenny's Californian roots show through a lot in their image (the way they dress, sunny locations etc) our videos is bound to be slightly different as it was filmed in England in the middle of Winter. Therefore, I think we bought a little of our own British style to our video :)

Bronwyn's Filmed Evaluation

Question 3

After the deadline for editing our music video’s the class watched back everyone’s music video to give the groups feedback of how well we did and what our strong and weak parts were of our music videos. This was very interesting as we could compare how well we did against other people and it was a chance to see what we could get over all by filling in a questionnaire and putting a mark down what we would give them with the marking criteria in mind. The audience age was from 17 to 18 and was a mix gendered.  

Overall I’m happy with the feedback we got as it was mostly positive comments back. I was worried with what we might have got back; as I felt, as it was our class marking it they might be really harsh. But they all said similar things and gave pretty similar marks, which was good as everyone noised the same thing and was all on the same level. It was more over average, which is what we wanted.

They said the music video was

-Suitable for the song we did, as the conventions related to the genre and it suited the mood of the music being slow.

- Appropriate actors cast and costume.

- Good lighting

- Good locations fitted with the genre and story

-Kept you interested by having narrative and performance based.

-Shots were steady

-Well framed shots

-The effects were well done

The number one thing that people loved was the green screen effect of the paper being set on fire with the moving image. They weren’t sure how it work and said it looked quite professional and didn’t look tacky.

The negative feedback we got which I do agree on is:

-Some of the lip synching issue being out of synch

-Our actor’s hair being in his face too much was distracting and couldn’t see him singing.

-Shorter shots needed to keep attention going

-Actors to look more comfortable.

-More close up shots

I think we would have overcome more of these issues if we had followed the shot list better as it had more ideas in there we would have had more different shots. But I feel we did the best we could do and our feedback has been more positive.

Question 2

In the process of making the digipak and webpage, ideas kept changing and being developed but we always had the idea of having something fun and quirky. We kind of maintained the theme of having a dinner table set out with a home feeling of pictures, newspaper and a dinner plate (with Jenny and Johnny being spelt out in spaghetti). The overall idea of this came from the line in the song ‘used to dine out on a dollar’ we though we would interpret that line for the couple to have there own personal meaning behind it and have a recognising object of a slice of toast with alphabet spaghetti spelling something out. That idea helped us from the first design of the digipak on paper as we can see where the ideas started out. Also we knew that we wanted our product to be bright and colourful to grab audience attention, Photoshop would be useful to achieve this by changing the colours and contrast.  

What we have maintain through out the CD and Webpage

-Used very bright and colourful colours. To get the colours to stand out more, with the use of photoshop we were able to turn the contrast, brightness and colours up to get the effect we wanted. Gives a cartoon look.

-The layering effect is well maintain through out the CD cover and website which gives a 3D effect.

-Shows the quirkiness of the band     

When making the CD cover and webpage we show on both products the backgrounds being on a table cloth and having cut out lettering from magazines of the words ‘Switchblade’ or ‘Jenny’ and ‘Johnny’. Which connected them together and showed that quirkiness of the homey felling theme. But we do show a difference of the two products by the webpage main focus having a different theme and atmosphere to the CD cover. The reason for this was when using Photoshop a photo we took of the bottles on the floor looked very effective when altering the filters and colours and we wanted to show the conventions of the sex, alcohol and drugs by the image being bottles and cans which is a contrast between the two. 

We felt that Jenny and Johnny’s website could have been more interesting as well. It’s very simple but I do like how they’ve used their colours and there iconic snake.

From Jenny and Johnny’s music video they have used an image from ‘Big Wave’ for the front of there CD cover. And we did something similar of having our actors in our location of our music video for the image to go on our CD cover. This promotes the music video as well you can recognize where the image is from.  

  Official CD cover 'I'm having fun now' 

Image from music video

A shot of the CD cover with the picture of them in the locatio on the same bench we filmed at.

A shot from the music video same bench.

Mart's Evaluation - Question Two

Question Two: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

We have maintained a clear image and theme throughout our campaign by keeping everything very similar. For example, our Digipak and Webpage photo shoot was taken when we were filming so we didn’t have to organise another date to meet up for a shoot and that the actors were all in their costumes and would be ‘in the zone’ when it came to acting as our artists Jenny and Johnny.


Our digipak and webpage uses images that appear in the music video and vice versa. This pulls all the different pieces of work together and makes it into one grouped piece instead of feeling like separate work. By interrelating the webpage, Digipak and video it creates a consistent image of the band and that is good for continuity so the audience know what to expect and Jenny and Johnny will be able to use those relations to good effect as it may become a sort of catchphrase or image for them.

A shot without any effects that is used for the album cover

Jenny and Johnny use a shot from their video 'Big Wave' on the album cover

The main purpose of the webpage is for communication to occur between the artists and their fans. This is crucial as the fans want to feel connected and appreciated for the money that they spend on the band. If there is no communication then the fan base would start to become disloyal as the fans need to feel part of the group not just fans on the outside. By placing Twitter and Facebook feeds onto the webpage makes the communication very easy for both Jenny and Jonny to advertise tours and new singles/albums and for the fans to ask questions and communicate between themselves.

The Digipak has to be attractive to the eye as it needs to stand out on the shelf to sell records. In my opinion our Digipak is very eye catching and is appropriate to the song and the artists. It is also very noticeable for the fans to see when buying Jenny and Johnny related merchandise and some of the artwork on the Digipak could be used for merchandise such as posters or clothing designs.

Jenny and Johnny use a image from their music video to advertise their shop

Synergy, which can be defined as two things working together to gain a result that couldn't happen independently is very much a key factor when deciding on aspects of the music video, webpage and Digipak. The synergy between them all has to be there as without it, none of them would be individually successful. This is because the the music video may only get made if the song is popular and for the song to be popular the band has to have a good media image. This is where the website plays into the cycler flow of media where one media product interwebs into other media products to achieve the best results.

As mentioned in the planning and research stages of the production, I found out that the best webpage’s are those that are simple and design and heavily feature the artists images in prominent positions so they are all recognisable. By featuring the band images so much this shows the audience exactly who are in the band and what the feel of the artists is. Another example of synergy is keeping appearance looks similar. If Gene Simmons came onto stage without any makeup on or was pictured without makeup the audience wouldn’t know how to react or they might not even know that it is Gene Simmons due to the change of image.

Gene Simmons with and without make up. Recognisable consistent styling is needed.

Our Digipak and webpage compared well to the Digipak’s and webpages of similar artists. Our Digipak and webpage are very simple in their design but are very effective as they show off the artists in the best possible way and they tie in all of the different products. 

Question 1

Our music video= Jenny and Johnny 'Switchblade'

-See music video in a diferent blog post

Our Artist Offical music video= Jenny and Johnny 'Big Wave'

Jenny and Johnny 'Big Wave' Video link

Rivalry artist= Best Coast 'Boyfriend'

When looking at these indie folk music videos the conventions we expect to find in these music videos are performance base, natural locations, for a relax/unique image from the artist, a quirky twist and maybe narrative. Our music video shows similar characteristics of both of these music video through our genre style of music. Another convention inside alternative indie videos are references to sex, drugs and alcohol to show an exciting life style.

 

Showing these conventions of the alcohol in our music video.

One of the first things I recognized between the music video was the location and lighting of the mise en scene. Even though in ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘Big Wave’ music video, are shot in America and you can see this through the is different climate and objects (like the cars), compared to our music video shot in the UK. But they all had a similar atmosphere between them all, showing outdoors natural places in natural light like you would see in an indie folk music video.

Because of having these outdoor locations the costumes are very different, as ‘Jenny and Johnny’ and ‘Best coat’ they both have a vintage rock and roll style and have gone for costumes that are more summery in these videos. The girls are in dresses and wearing bright and colourful colours. As America is warmer and probably shot in summer time they could use that convention of wearing more colours. But as ours was shot in December it shows how the weather can control the costumes, as we had to ask our actors to wear warmer clothing. If we shot this in summer we would ask our actors to wear summer clothing. But I think our costume showed a nice twist of Jenny and Johnny characters being English.   

As our song is slow and more relaxed (not upbeat) the length of some of our shots were quite long to an averaged shot length of music videos. But this suited the music as it being mostly acoustic you don’t want the shot changing constantly between a long verse. Where as ‘Boyfriend’ have an average 2-4 second shots but because this is constant through it makes some of the shots look longer, which as the tempo of the song is a steady 4/4 count (not to fast) with a constant beat is a appropriate with there style of song. Where as in ‘Big Wave’ they’ve got shot that are less then a second as they’ve got so many different effect going off this has kept the viewer more interested by having shorter shots. 

The use of editing effects in these videos shows different styles and use of effects. As in ‘Boyfriend’ they don’t use any effects apart from a slight hazy filter effect in the shots to make it look more vintage. 

Where as in ‘Big wave’ there are so many different effects by having loads of different coloured filters and effects of pixelate and having slowed down shots. And they combined more then one effect together. This was effective as they made some shots more interesting by having a filter over the shot.

They also used some animation in there music video as the snake appears on the women’s back in a drawn on effect.

The use of our effects is completely different, as we’ve used green screen effect. Which I feel, we’ve challenged the conventions, as I haven’t seen many music video’s future this use of a photographic image moving and it shows unrealism. And especially of a photo being burnt as well, which works really, well as people in college asked us how it was done. We were going to use a filter over some of the past parts in our music video but we didn’t have time to experiment with the filters as we ran out of time.      

In our music video it was important that we showed a love story as we had that advantage of the artist being in a relationship (Jenny and Johnny), our actors had a strong connection to the role of Jenny and Johnny as they were in a relationship too. Shots had to include both of them in together showing their relationship.  

The difference between our music video is we had narrative of a love story as well as performance base of just of our actors, where as in ‘Big wave’ it was more performance base and showed them being in a relation (no narrative). But in ‘Boyfriend’ it had a loose narrative of someone getting married and the band performance overlapping each other as the band performing at the wedding. (Best coast had the same idea as  Paolo Nutini did in his music video ‘Candy’ which I did my textual analysis on).