Tuesday, 20 March 2012

Question 4 Evaluation

This is my evaluation of all technologies I have used within post production and research and planning.   

Thursday, 9 February 2012

Evaluation Question 3 - Part 2

To gather audience feedback we had our media class and friends take a look at our music video and give us feedback using these orange sheets, The above picture is an example of two of the feedback sheets we got from them. The main issues we got were about the lack of a lot of ranges of shots in our video which we didn't think was there. This is why it is good to get feedback from different people as you get to see what your work comes across as to other people. 

I agree completely with the feedback we received which is nice, I thought that we could've done more of a variety of shot frames to keep it looking interesting but one problem with that was the fact that we were trying to go for a documentary styled video which started to block us from doing certain shots. This was because we had to stick to having longer shots and more standardised framing to keep in line with documentaries actually on TV. 


One limitation of doing feedback sheets could be that it's people's opinion and it could come across as beneficial for the us (the people gathering the information) although there are strengths and weaknesses for it, I feel that it helped us to properly evaluate good and bad points of the whole campaign.

Evaluation Question 3 - Part 1 (Wordle)

We had feedback sheets given to us from our peers so that we could hopefully get some constructive feedback that would help us to evaluate what we'd done overall. We got some feedback sheets back from our class and split them between the three of us to analyse them.

Here is the positive feedback we got from the sheets we gave out to classmates sorted out in Wordle:

I also organised the negative feedback with Worldle which is below:

I can see from the other members of the group's wordle analysis' that we all got some pretty similar results which show that the problems are being seen by people more so maybe we should've looked into them more when completing the music video. 

The feedback we got was overall very helpful and I would definitely choose this method again when wanting to evaluate.

Evaluation Question 2 - Part 2

These are our digipak and website final designs, along with our video I think that they all work fit the same purpose. I feel that the campaign all together works for the target audience we were aiming for which is a big bonus!
the use of the pictures and where we filmed went well together due to the shabbiness of the location of both the pictures and where we filmed. 
The relationship between the website and the CD digipak is quite strong, we kept dark colours such as black and white, with minimal colouring. The black and white picture on the back cover was the first picture we thought of using on the CD, as Matt another member of the group was taking pictures for his photography coursework we ended up using his photography on both the CD covers and the website - although this isn't obvious through the pictures it is a big connection between the two.

These are the website homepage and digipak pictures of The Who, which are a band from the same genre at The Jam.
You can see the theme that is travelling between the two which is what we were trying to aim for when creating our campaign. This is shown through the logo that The Who have used throughout their musical career. It is a well known logo which most people know of. Although a lot of people know the logo but don't know the band - even knowing the logo is giving publicity to the band even after all of these years.
In comparison to the campaign we produced I feel that although the quality of our work differs (obviously because they were done by professionals and we are only A Level students) the way we have created our links are different but would still work in my opinion.
On the two pictures surrounding, you can see the theme of the genre we were trying to keep within and what the town called 'Malice' is about. In the first screen grab we have our actor in the foreground and in the background, a homeless person swearing at him. We thought that this would be effective due to the image we were trying to create. With 'Malice' being a visibly horrible place, yet us trying to promote it. We hoped that the irony would could through with the whole campaign put together. 
On the second picture above, we did a pan of the surrounding area to where we were filming. I thought that this shot worked well as it helped to reinforce the idea that we were creating through the music video. The pictures we used in the digipak related well to this particular shot which helped to bring the whole campaign together in a fluent way.
The picture with the homeless person holding the cardboard cut out worked well as the keyword being 'malice' as shown many times throughout the video helped to build the bridge between the video and the website/digipak. 
The screen shot with the colour bars was initially an idea because we had recorded one of the clips in the wrong timing so the lip syncing was out - although it seemed a problem at the time we think that it has worked out for the best. The use of the camera failing in the middle of the song looked really good. It helped to make the video look older as it's what happened to TVs back in the 70s which luckily, is the era that we were aiming to stick to whilst filming and creating our whole campaign. 
The shot with the supermarket in the background formed from the lyrics 'stashed against the co-op'. Although it's obviously not a co-op we wanted to make the lyrics relate to what we were showing on screen more, as we found after filming for the first time that although it looked okay - we agreed that we needed to make the lyrics and footage match a bit more so that it still looked like a music video.
This close-up I believe worked really well as in the background there is a brick wall to assure concentration on the face - which again relates to the background of our website design which features a brick wall. Although it's only a minor similarity for a brick wall we thought small and wanted everything to fit in perfectly. 
The picture to the right shows a still of our actors feet, in the video he moves and dances to the rhythm of the song so it fits in really well. Also the shoes that he is wearing were very commonly worn in the 70s which again brings everything back to our whole campaign working well in sync.



This picture is from the end of our video, originally we were just going to have the music video fade to black but we thought as we had the idea to make it a documentary, we thought having the BBC logo that was commonly on after everything on TV in past years. This made us feel like we'd created a mock TV documentary - and brought back some childhood memories!






Evaluation: Question 3 - Part 1

Although we are very happy with the overall mark (34 out of 40) that we were given, there are still some area's of the music video that could of been improved further. Each pair in the audience (20 people) was given an anonymous feedback sheet to fill out. This tells us what worked well in our video and what needs improving.


On the feedback sheet on the right it shows that they didn't feel there was enough variety of shots in our music video. This was an aspect that we were aware of during the production of our music video. Personally, I agree that there was a lower amount of close ups than seen in other music videos and the previous  A Town Called Malice video (Youtube). However, because the music video was a hybrid of a music video and a documentary of a location, we had to meet conventions of both media texts. Upon our research we found that documentaries use a lot of establishing and long shots (Example of researched documentary video - Birmingham Bullring 1985 (Youtube), a contrast to what we see in a performance style music video. To overcome this problem we used as many close ups as possible whilst the actor was performing and we weren't showing the surroundings of 'Malice'. As well as close ups of performance we included close ups of key props and surroundings. (Examples can be seen below)

                    
                      Close-up of performance
Close-up surroundings
One of the sheets also explained that they spotted some errors with lip-syncing. One of the problems that we came across during our production was lip-syncing with the addition of effects. Once we had edit our music video we ensured that all of the lip syncing was on time and to the best standard possible, however once we applied after effects on iMovie the syncing seemed slightly off. After some analysis we realised that it was the 'television bars' and 'Bump distortion' that had caused the problem. Because the video now looked like it was poorer quality and was distorted, some of the lip syncing seemed slightly off time or incorrect. This was an aspect that could not be helped, however if we were to do the project again we would reconsider the use of after effects or the intensity used on them. This was also a critique  mentioned as some of the audience members found the effects overpowering and over the top.

Evaluation Question 3 - Part 2

Using wordle I made a map of all the words in the box for what needs improving from each feedback sheet. In conclusion to what we can see on the mind map, we can gather that a wider variety of shots should have been used and the lip syncing needs to be corrected. One of the only problems with this feedback is that it isn't taken from a variety of people. Most of the audience members were 17 or 18 years old, meaning that some of the results could be biased if their opinions were a result of age. Another reason that our audience feedback could be biased is because the audience was all Media students. This means that they were critiquing our video from a technical point of view and not watching it from an entertainment standpoint.

Despite the possibly biased feedback, I feel that it is accurate. If we had longer on the production of our music video then we would look at the strength of the effects added post-editing. By doing this we would have resolved the problem of the lip-syncing that is hard to see and understand by slightly manipulating the shot lengths. As well as this,  we may have possibly been able to shoot more footage which would have included more close-ups and mid shots, adding the variety that was wanted from the audience .