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.