Thursday 15 March 2012

Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?




Our class friends watched our video without out us in the room and wrote feedback sheets telling us truthfully what we think. 
Over all the feedback was good. 
Most of the people who wrote on the sheets said that our overall performance was either suitable or professional. They gave us Level 3-4 and said that our music video held their attention. The only negative feedback we had were the ones that my group and I were worrying about. They said the lip syncing on the singing could of been better, however they were impressed with the lip syncing of the rapping scenes as the song gets fast paced and hard to follow. Another criticism was that the guitar wasnt convincing enough and to say that the instrumental was mainly using guitars it would of worked in our favour to have more close ups of the guitar. 
Although we still had some criticisms over all I think it went well. Peoples favourite part was either the hospital scene, Ashley rapping or the fight scene. I think the music video was successful in that we caught peoples attention, we had a vary of shot types and we had performance and narrative. However looking at the feedback sheets We now realise that we should have edited and shot more shots so that we had a selection to choose from. We should have also maybe chose an actor that could actually play the guitar so we could of got more close ups. 

Thursday 8 March 2012

Reflective Evaluation Question One

We took inspiration from the A-team video, which is the original version of our song.
In one of the shots from the a team video, the artist is seen interacting and as the only person to show kindness towards the girl, we tried to re create the interaction between the artist and the girl but in a different way, was our artists show a look of dissapointment in her as she walks past. However we think this was a subtle yet affective way of including our artists in the narrative whilst not confusing our audience.
We used the black and white affect in our video when the main drama of our narrative happened. We thought this was more affective than the A team version as during our research and planning we found that a lot of audiences found the black and white effect boring and that the video should not be in black and white all the way through. Therefore we decided to only add the black and white affect to the most dramatic parts of our music video, e.g. when the girl is getting beat up. This added much more drama and feeling to our music video whilst the bright contrasting colours during the beginning of the video kept the audiences attention.
The camera we used enabled us to go in and out of focus whilst filming, we tested a couple of these shots and thought it worked well, we also got this idea from the a team video, i think it gave the audience a chance to empaphise with the character, as the change in focus could show that the young girl is confused and vunerable, as if her whole life is a blur to her now.

Reflective Evaluation - Question 1

One of our main concerns during our filming and planning, was how we were going to make the genre of our music video clear to the audience. The song and artist we chose to make our music video from are in the indie genre. We made this clear to the audience through our mise en scene, locations and costumes.

The costumes of our artists were very casual and laid back, rather than glamorous and label focused. We asked the artists to keep the clothes casual so it was still clear to the audience that this was an Indie music video rather than Pop or Rap. We took inspiration from the original artist Ed Sheeran's clothing.

 The graffiti wall was used more as a theme throughout our project, rather than being used as just one background, this was effective in connecting our digipak, website, videos and photos all together. The graffiti wall gives an urban look to our music video, it also creates an inner-city feeling, which will hopefully attract our target audience; working class teenagers.

Wednesday 29 February 2012

What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?

Feedback Sheet One:


This feedback is of our final video therefore we were not able to change the elements which they believed did not work well for instance improving the guitar playing. The people who gave us this feedback were anoymous however we are aware that they are around the ages of 17 and 18. I agree with them saying that the actor playing Ed Sheeran was not as convincing as we hoped in terms of playing during the instrumental however I believe that some of the rapping areas appeared proffessional as the lip syncing was accurate therefore I slightly disagree that these people believe that our movie looked more like a 'short film'.


Feedback Sheet Two:


Once again I disagree that the whole of our music video appeared unproffessional since we had convincing locations and good shots of the rapper lip syncing infront of the graffiti wall. I understand that near the end of our video the rappers connection with the audience is not as strong as at the beginning therefore I agree that the lip synching and eye contact for those shots could have been improved. As the people who watched our film did not like the artist it was hard to sell the song to them through our music video since they are already aware that they do not like his style of Indie music.

Feedback Sheet Three:


To my surprise this group did not find any problems with the lip-syncing or instrumental playing even though I thought that this was our weakess area in some parts of the film. They enjoyed the different locations we used which I think was important to include as it helped portray a realistic narrative of the Girl. I thought that our use of costume suited the style of our artist and Indie genre which the audience agreed with. The lighting appears to be a problem in our film as it 'didn't fit the mood' which looking back at now I would consider our use of lighting more effectively.

Feedback Sheet Four:


The audience here considered the narrative to be weaker than they hoped as they wanted the murder of the Girl to be more violent however we did not want to show brutal violence since our target audience was around the ages of 15-16. This feedback was positive, making our group feel more confident about our video on the other hand we are still aware that areas of our film can still be improved.

Improvements:

If we could change any areas in our music video I would alter our use of lighting and have an actor who was able to play the guitar since this would appear more convincing to our audience. Some of the feedback sheets above highlight that we should have used a variety of shots, this is something that I would consider however I do think that we had a range of shots in the narrative, extra effects and smooth transitions therefore I would improve the shots of Ed Sheeran's performance as we could have used more close up and angled shots.

Questionnaire:

Since our feedback was given back in the form of a questionnaire it makes the audience less likely to write down their intial reaction to the piece or their opinions. Also it makes the different groups feedback similar as they have to discuss the same areas of our music video. On the other hand, it gave the audience a chance to look more constructively into our piece in terms of analysing the lip-synching and how successfully it portrayed our artist, this feedback helps us more aware of how our film worked well or could have been improved.

A2 Advanced portfolio: Refelctive Evaluation - Question two.

We followed the conventions of our Indie/Grime genre by using urban mis-en-scene, for example, using graffiti walls as our main theme and backgrounds from the website to the CD digipak and also the video its self.
CD and digipak
We used the graffiti wall to introduce the Genre, for example if somebody where to be looking through a music shop we wanted them to able able to recognise the theme of the CD cover, website and Music video and also to be able to understand the genre through the use of pictures. 
As you can tell from the images above our theme throughout the project is graffiti. Me and my group believe it is artistic and urban and the urban enviroment really adds to the affect and meaning  of the song.
We also  used authentic props like old guitars and urban studio rooms to create the effect of being grimey and urban which follows the conventions of both of our Genres (Grime and Indie)
 we think that the theme we have which is authentic yet modern (musical instruments and Graffiti) really targets our target audience. We know that Ed sheeran has pictures with either guitars or infront of urban areas.

We think that we followed the conventions of our genre well and tried our best to portray our artist convincingly.