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.