Amber's Evalutation Question four

How did you user media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?


A video response to the question:

Amber's Evaluation Question Three-Wordle

Amber's Evaluation Question Three

What have you learned from your audience feed back?

We gathered some audience feed back in various ways. The most pronounced  being asking some of our peers to watch the video and fill in a Questionnaire. I've added some of the Questionnaires we received in here.

There was a lot of good feedback from the other groups, although they did highlight a few issues they had with our videos. For example a few people thought there weren't enough shot varieties in the video, and some other pointed out that they thought some of the drums weren't synced properly.

Some other weaknesses in the video, were that, as one person pointed out, the guitar doesn't look like it's really been played, which is unfortunate, but we did our best to find an actor who looked the part of Miles Kane, who would be willing to act for us, and he did try his best.

Someone else said that they felt the narrative needed a bit more development, as they didn't understand quite understand what was going on, which was something we as a group noticed when we'd finished the music video.

We also got verbal feedback from our teachers and some of our peers that didn't take media, using the youtube channel, to show them the video. We got a lot of the same comments which went towards some of the changes we made before completing our video.

Some of the things we changed after receiving feedback, was the lip-syncing and the amount of performance shots. Other people picked up on things we hadn't noticed and pointed out that they felt there should be more performance rather than dancing.

Going back and changing things we feel we improved our video, although there were some things we couldn't change, as we didn't have the opportunity to re-film. This was a little frustrating, as once the issues had been pointed out, they stuck out to us. Some other problems with the feedback was that when we went back to change things when our video was near completion, was that cutting clips and putting them in the exactly correct places was harder now, because we had to make sure all the lip-syncing was still right.
We also got some feedback that contradicted other comments, and we had to make a decision as to which we would follow.

Other feedback sheets - Sophie

These are the other feedback sheets we collected from are audience, overall they are positive comments. 

Amber's Evalutation Question Two

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

Throughout the campaign, I feel we have kept a very clear theme. This is because through out our work we have maintained a simplistic style that is associated with Miles Kane. We’ve done this through mise-en-scene and narrative in our music video, and the layout and design of our website and Digipak.

We’ve kept to plain colours and a black and white base. For example, on the Website we’ve used black, for the background, and have edited the colours on the CD covers to be black and white. We've used pink as the only colour point on both. Using Pink for the CD Title and the website headings made them stand out against the black and white backgrounds.

We felt that this was appropriate because Miles Kane had used this styling for his previous album, the colours involved being black, white and pink. And by using something that is easily recognisable as a Miles Kane product it is more likely that our products will attract his fans and other indie loving audiences, because Miles Kane is very typical in his indie style.

The website and the Digipak are interrelated through their composition and design.

They serve the same purpose, to sell the artist and have been made specifically to do so.

The website promotes the artist and features images of the artist performing and tour dates.

The Digipak focuses on the artist using images of Miles Kane, performing, and cementing the idea that he plays his own music, as is his goal, stated in an interview.

The music video is also interrelated with the other two products as it uses the same themes and conventions. Like the CD and Website, the music video features a very simple location, with minimalistic mise-en-scene. The narrative in the video, although maybe more expanded than in other Miles Kane videos, carries the same kind of theme that is typical of his previous examples. As it too complies with what would be expected of Miles Kane, it helps sell the artist, with many shots of our Miles Kane, playing his guitar and singing, enhancing the idea that he can genuinely  make his own music. It also means that it appeals to the target audience as it follows the indie conventions.

Our website promotes both the CD and the video, as both are feature on the site, showing that all are related. The CD also matches the website in colour, images and layout, and the music video relates to both through the the way it was edited. The black and white effect used on certain shots, that fade into and out of colour match the design of the Digipak, where ever though the images is set as black and white, some comes through, although it appears very washed out. It also relates to the website because the people featured in the images on the site, are present in the music video, showing that all three products are in fact related.

CD COVER, OUTSIDE

CD COVER, INSIDE

 WEBSITE

Katy Perry's California gurls Digipak.

Screen caps from Katy Perry's California gurls video

This set of products sell the artist as Katy Perry is the main feature of the video and the Digipak, and both the video and the CD cover carry a sweet related theme making them instantly recognisable as related. I feel that though our products are from a different genre to Katy Perry, we have achieved a similar effect with the things we have created, by having a common theme running through all of our products and having our artist as the main feature.

Evaluations

After showing our music video to the rest of our class, they gave us feedback on what they liked about the video, whether they felt the product sold the artist to them, whether it fitted with the conventions of the genre and artist and anything that could have been improved:

Important photos and shots

Here are some shots we think are important that are in our video and screen grabs of our website and digi pack :

Finished video

We have finally finished our music video. After enormous amount of stress due to lack of location, actors availablitly and re shooting we have uploaded our clips, put it all together, cut it down and edit it to create our 3 minute video.

Editing in progress

We decided that we wanted to keep the black and white idea in our video so when we looked through our video and the effects available we decided to use the Old B&W effect and made it so the effect finished halfway though this clip. The clip before are all B&W so its as though colour comes into being when the dancing couple enter the dance hall.

Editing ideas

We have looked at the brightness and contrast effect and found that it worked quite well. We have also looked at other effects that might improve the quality of our footage. Some of the effects we've looked at are;

Soft focus,
Sharpen,
ss adjust colours, shadows
ss adjust colours highlights.

Of the ones we have looked at we decided that soft focus didn't work very well and neither did the sharpen as they drew attention to the poor quality rather than away from it.

Soft focus

Sharpen

We have also compared two clips, one with the brightness and contrast and the other without.

Effect added

no effect

We found that the adjust colours shadows and highlights effects both made the video look better. We also noticed that the highlights would allow us to put a more subtle blue filter over our footage if we used it.

Shadows

Highlights

Editing ideas

We have re-watched our video and have considered some other effects we might use.

Since we wanted a blue filter over parts of our video, we have looked at the Colour monochrome, ss response curve blue extreme, ss Extract blue. We have looked through all of these but have found that they are too bright, as we wanted something that would be more subtle in its filtering.

When we were thinking about doing this, we thought about using light filters when shooting but found that it didn't give the effect that we wanted and so though it best to leave it to editing. So far we haven't found anything suitable for the blue effect and have decided that if we can't find anything appropriate we will have to scrap the idea completely.

Colour monochrome

ss Extract Blue

ss Response curve extreme blue.

Video progress

We have completed the sequencing of our video, and now all we have to do is add effects. We have spent some time thinking about what we want to do with our video, and found that we will have to use effects to minimise the poor quality of some of the footage, where the camera wouldn't focus properly. We feel the most appropriate effect would be the brightness and contrast as it would make the colours brighter and the graininess of the footage less noticeable.

By using this effect we can also make all the lighting in our video look more alike, since there are a few shots that are much brighter than the others.

We are also considering whether or not our footage would still work with the black and white effect we were originally wanted for our video.

Video Progress

We have almost completed our video, and only have a few more seconds of time to fill, before we can start adding our effects to it, and finishing it completely.

We have had to re-film some parts because the footage was either too poor quality or missing. We also had to revert a few of our clips to the original, to find footage that was mistakenly deleted.

Amber's Evalutation Question One

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

I have uploaded three videos, one is our music video, another is a Miles Kane video and the last is a video by Noah and the whale.

Mile Kane and Noah and the whale both follow the conventions of indie quite closely, with very simple locations, the Mise-en-scene very basic, minimalistic and plain.

So when we created our music video having decided that the best way to attract our target audience was to follow convention, it came out very similar to these two examples.

Some rather more noticeable similarities between the three videos are the chosen locations. Come closer uses a ‘working mans pub/club’ type of location, and give it all back has many locations that look sort of tacky, homey and everyday, like a child’s bedroom and a stage at an old school. The location we used was a school hall with a stage, empty apart from the instruments used by the band.

As with the other two videos our music video featured many shots of the artist playing their own instruments and performing as is expected from an indie band.

We developed this idea in our own video, making the Artist performing, part of our narrative, drawing the two video types together in an attempt to make our video more interesting.

The narrative we chose was one that features in a lot of music videos. And since Performance is the most important aspect of an indie video, we chose one we could merge with the performance.

Although we did challenge the conventions slightly by using more narrative than is common in Miles Kane videos, because the skeleton narrative we had needed to be fleshed out in order for the audience to make sense of it, and we felt that by increasing the amount of narrative in our video, it might appeal more to the audience, by giving them an interesting story to follow as well as the track to listen too.

The only postmodern idea that we have used in our music video is referencing dance shows like Strictly come dancing, when the band members judge the dancers on their performance.

 

Editing in process

In our next lesson after our second shooting, we set about editing and cutting down our footage to fit in with the storyboard lengths and ofcourse with the music.

We first starting placing in the footage according to our storyboard and cutting it down to match, we then looked over it and decided that although we filmed the shots in order the amount of footage we had that were suppose to start before the music was too long. So we choose to start the music straight in with the footage and mix the beginning clips together instead of having long sections of narrative then performance as it fits better and attracts the audience.

So far we have done the first minute of the song and the last couple of shots at the end. With a little bit more done in our free time at college, it will definitely be done in time so long as we have the right, quality amount of shots throughout the song.

Here are some screen grabs of what we have done so far: