Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I have used audience feedback right from the start of the year, all the way through to help with different aspects of the course. The first part of audience feedback that I gained was from our friends and family through a questionnaire that we designed as a group. We asked questions such as "How do you usually watch music videos?", "What are your expectations of rock music videos?" and "What colours do you think represent the rock genre? and why?". We handed out paper versions of these questionnaires for people to fill out and also sent them around the social networking site Facebook to gain some feedback from different types of media:



From these questionnaire results we found that most people watch music videos on the Internet and some on the TV but they are rarely downloaded to watch. The majority of people's expectations of rock music videos we found are that they should be mainly performance where the band are shown with their instruments. Also the colours that they associate with the rock genre are mainly dark colours such as black and white and grey. This audience feedback helped us to come up with some initial ideas including a black and white element and some performance shots of a band that we will feature.

The next part of audience feedback that we received was from people in my media class and my teacher when our group presented a "treatment" to them about what we hoped to achieve with our music video and all of our initial ideas. We got some really positive feedback from everyone that gave us a lot of confidence in our initial ideas and we knew that we had created some ideas that would appeal to a lot of people. This is a world cloud that I created on wordle that included some of the feedback we received:



Some of the other feedback we also gained from this session shaped our video and helped us improve our ideas. For example in the treatment we presented to the class we told them that we wanted to create a performance scene with an audience and have one girl stand out in the clothes that she wears to show she is the obsessed fan. The feedback we received however, told us that if we tried to created to "gig" type of scene it could look really bad as we do not have access to big enough numbers of people to come and star in our "audience" so it would look empty and not very professional. We took this positive criticism from the feedback and decided to instead create a performance scene without an audience and create more of a "band practice" scene.

After we had filmed our footage for our video and started to put bits of it together we then gained some more audience feedback to see if we were on the right lines with our production. We showed our friends some of the stop motion clips we made such as the guitar with the kisses and the magazine cuttings building up on the floor. The feedback we got back from this was really positive and everyone seemed to really enjoy it as it was something that was a bit different but really effective when put to the beat of the music. We also showed them the first draft of our music video that was concentrating on the ending where the music builds up and Charlotte rips up all the magazines. Everyone said they loved the first draft especially the stop motions and couldn't wait to see what we did next which gave us confidence to carry on the way we were going.

Each draft that we uploaded to YouTube, we made sure we gained some audience feedback on it to see if there was anything we could improve on or change or add. On draft 3, we gained some feedback from people that said we should take out a clip from the very ending as it looked like we had two endings. After the build up of all the music and Charlotte ripping up the magazines we had a clip of a slow pan across Charlotte's arm resting on top of all of the magazines and then we also had a clip of Tom putting down his bass against an amp. Our feedback told us that by only having one of these clips will make the ending better and clearer to the audience. We then asked a group of people which shot we should take out and the majority of the group agreed we should take out the shot of Charlotte's arm so that the ending shot was of Tom putting down the bass.



Once we had completed almost all of the video, there was just one part that we needed to finish but as a group could not decide that would be effective. It was the very ending of the video just after the stop motion of the sound board. We knew that we needed to have a very powerful ending due to the tempo of the music but we didn't know what to put. We decided to show our video to people in our media class and also people outside of the lesson who had not seen the video before to give us some ideas on how they interpreted the narrative and what they thought would be a powerful ending. We got some really interesting feedback from people on their interpretations of the narrative and they were all quite different which made us realise we had created an enigma code (Barthes) and our narrative could be interpreted in different ways depending on how it was watched and who by. Some of the ideas that we got on how to end our video included:

- Pure performance of Tom on stage
- Charlotte on the stage that the band had been on to represent her presence wherever the band is
- Lyrics appearing on the screen

We decided to take these ideas but also look at other videos on YouTube to see if we could gain any inspiration. We finally decided on our ending of Charlotte having the lyrics painted on her body and smudging them away due to the audience feedback we gained because they helped us see a new perspective on the meaning of our video and helped us with ideas.

The final bit of audience feedback we gained was from a screening evening at our school where we showed our final video to everyone in our year, the year below and people in year 11 who want to take media studies as an A level. We gave them a sheet of paper with 2 questions on it that were:

1. What did you like about our music video?
2. What is your favourite part of our music video and why?



All of the feedback we gained from this session was positive which made us really proud to have finished and produced something enjoyable for an audience. These were some of the responses we got from the audience:








All of the audience feedback that I gained throughout the year helped our group to shape the production we made and helped us make some important decisions that improved our video and made it the best quality for our target audience.

Evaluation - Question 4

We answered this question as a group and decided to present it as a voice over over our video that we muted and then put up various necessary pictures to illustrate what we are saying:

Video screening and audience feedback

After school last week the media department had a screening of the whole years work. All of sixth form, all of the teachers and all the year 11s who are interested in taking media studies as an A level were invited. They were each given a sheet on their chair that had 2 questions:
1. What did you like about our music video?
2. What is your favourite part of our music video and why?

We watched everyones music video on a big projector and then had time to right down our comments. After the screening our audience were then invited to our "camera corner" where we had a flip camera set up and asked people questions that were specific to our own production. Our questions included:
1. What was your interpretation of our narrative?
2. What did you think our 3 way split screen represented?
3. What was your favourite part of our video?

We got some really positive feedback and everyone who watched it seemed to really enjoy it. Some of the responses we got from the questions on the sheets included comments such as:

"The make up applying fitted well with the rock genre"
"I loved the ice turning into hearts"
"The 3 way split screen was really effective and cool"
"The editing was interesting"
"I like the way the theme is portrayed throughout the video"
"The performance part was very realistic"
"I like the mix of the narrative and performance"
"My favourite part was the split screens"
"The editing techniques were very precise on the beat of the music"

This is a wordle with some of the words that people used to describe our final video:

Final edit

As a group we all sat down and edited the ending of our video to make it more powerful. We decided that to do this we need to mix it in with flashes of other parts of the video to make it choppy and effective for a big ending. We also added in some of the shots of Charlotte with the lyrics on her earlier on in the video to mix it up and make the video flow a bit more. After a few more tweeks to the video we finally decided it was finished and here is the final version:

The ending of our video

All we have left to do now with our video, is complete the ending. We have been finding it very hard to think about what to put in the end of our video as we have been told by people watching the video that it needs to be a powerful and strong ending to wrap up the narrative. We have been asking all of our friends to watch our video and decide on what they think the narrative means to them and how we could end it and we had some very interesting and different responses. Some people have said that they think the narrative is that Charlotte is obsessed with Tom and is always around him and doesn't leave him alone, however other people have said that they think the narrative is that Charlotte and Tom used to be in a relationship that broke down because Tom got too famous and too into his music and Charlotte did not like that. They also had different ideas for the ending and some people said it should just be a purely performance ending with Tom on the stage but others said the ending should be of Charlotte on the stage that the band had been filmed on previously, to show she is always where he is. This feedback in some ways helped us and in other ways confused us because we were not sure how to react to the different opinions but then later realised we had created a Barthes enigma code where the narrative could have many different meanings to people depending on how they viewed it!

This is some audience feedback that we got from some friends about their interpretations of our narrative:



As we were still not sure how to end our video we all sat down as a group and decided to look through some music videos for inspiration. In quite a few videos we found that the lyrics to the song actually appeared in word form in the video for example in "All of the lights" by Kanye West and "Lets go surfing" by the Drums:





We thought that this could possibly work for our music video but if we did it in a more creative way, and then came across the Marina and the Diamonds music video "I am not a robot". In this video, the lead singer is featured with paint all over her and occasionally smudging it over body:



We thought that we could combine the two techniques that we had found and paint the lyrics to the song onto Charlotte and have her smudge it to symbolise the end of their relationship. We could also use editing techniques to speed it up and cut it up to add a strange, powerful feeling to the ending which it what our audience feedback said it needed.

This is what the ending looks like with the initial editing of Charlotte smuding it but we will edit it more when we are next all together:

Draft 6

This is our 6th draft of our video where we have added in a lot more split screens and filled almost our whole video. Some of the split screens we included are performance elements of the band that we have cropped and flipped one side so it looks like they are playing side by side: