Final Video

After we uploaded our final video to YoutTube, we have been able to finally link it to our blog, which allows you to see the full transition from the planning stage of the project to our final finsihed product.

Evaluation Of The Whole Project

After the production of our video and print tasks, we were assigned another task, to produce an evaluation of our overall project, and whether or not we thought it was a success. To do this, we were given four questions to answer, these questions were:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

These have enabled us to give all of our ideas on what we felt were our projects strengths and weakness, and also talk about the overall process of research, planning and production. To do this, we produced four short video clips, which we filmed and edited using the same software as we did for the video project (Adobe Premier Pro). The four video clips were to big to post on blogger, so decided to link them to our blog via a YouTube channel, so the attached links go to each respective question:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXzZ4fWKIEk&feature=youtu.be
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCx8AQC7KN0&feature=youtu.be
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b71rswVffDc&feature=youtu.be
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDvkGrf3yd8&feature=youtu.be 

Audience Feedback For Print Task

To try and assess who our target audience would be, we had to ensure we got some level of sufficient audience feedback. For our print tasks, we left them out along with a big sheet of A2 paper, and asked for our target audience to give feedback. However, we asked for the feedback from students who do not do Media Studies as a subject, as we felt that an audience who weren't classed as 'media-savvy' would give more honest feeback, and focus on the overall structure of the project, as opposed to picking various aspects of the print task and focusing on those alone. This worked to an extent, as our audience picked up on various aspects they enjoyed, such as 'They loved the background', and highlighted the things they enjoyed about the print project. However, some of their feedback was not as in depth as we would have hoped for, such as 'I don't like the photo' but gave no elaboration on why they didn't like the photo.

Target Audience Questionnaire (Final Draft)

We have developed and improved the questionnaire we will give to our target audience to gain insight into their thoughts and ideas, and also we want to know what they think of our video/song, and give us feeback of what we can do to improve our video. The new revised questions which will hopefully give us a deeper insight to what our target audience are looking for in a music video are as followed:
Question 1: Did you enjoy the song? YES/NO Please say WHY?
Question 2: Did you enjoy the video? YES/NO Please say WHY?
Question 3: Did you understand the storyline of the video? YES/NO If NO, how do you think it could be made more understandable to the audience?
Question 4:  What would you classify as the genre of the video? How can you tell this?
Question 5: What do you feel could be improved in the video?
Question 6: Overall, how would you rate the Video? (With 1 being 'Very Good' and 5 being 'Very Poor')

Target Audience Questionnaire (First Draft)

To gain an insight into what our audience would like from us as the producers of the music video, we aim to have a focus group screening of our video, which would more likely consist of memebers of an AS-Level media class. To our knowledge, no-one in the class will know who we are, which will prevent bias when they give us feedback.
   The focus group will then be asked a questionnaire, consisting of six questions, which will help us gain insight into our target audience's thoughts on the video, and also, we can change our video according to how the feeback influences us. The questions on the questionnairre are as followed:
1. Did you enjoy the song? If NO, why not?
2. Did you enjoy the video? If NO, why not?
3. Did you understand the storyline of the video? If NO, how do you think the storyline could be made more understandable to the audience?
4. What genre would you class the music video as?
5. What was your own interpretation of what was happening in the video?
6. What do you feel could be improved in the video?

Print Task Flat Plans

For our print task, we produced four individual flatplans for our work. I worked on producing two, and David also worked on producing two, so that we had a variety of different ideas intergrated across the four different design styles.The two which David designed are rather simplistic, not really featuring the band predominantly, but have been scattered with quotes of the band, highlighting how good they are in an attempt to sell the album. The second two, designed by me, feature the band much more predominantly, highlighting how they are the main focus of the whole project. One features the band in a similar position to that of the album cover, with them positioned underneath the band name/album name. This is possibly the most likely one we will be using, so that our CD Cover and magazine article have similar designs, which helps keep up with the continuity of the whole project.

Changes To Storyline/First Audience Feedback

One of the difficulties we faced last year was the fact we had to keep changing our initial idea due to complications i.e cast changes, location changes and extraneous variables such as the weather. This year was no different, and as a result, we had to change our storyline to suit the resources we had capable to us. This change revolved largely around the first section of the video, where we originally intended to have the character of 'The Girl' hanging around with her friends and having a generally good time. However, as we could only cast one female character, and also the lyrics of the song at this point are rather unhappy and sombre, we adapted the storyline to make it appear like 'The Girl' is having an arguement with an off-screen character (we assume, one of the band to give the plot some validity). This means the storyline in the second verse has been adapted to her having gotten over this arguement with the band member, and is now on route to see this band member and apologise for their arguement last night.

   As a result of these changes, we needed to ensure that the plot still made sense to an audience who had not worked on the production of the video, therefore, we took a random sample of five people from our media class to watch the first two minutes of our video, (as the second verse begins at 01:47, therefore we felt this would be enough time for the audience to try and assess the narrative) to watch it uninterrupted and then relay to us what they thought had happened. We were very pleased to find that all five of the sample participants who watched the video were able to easily tell us the basic narrative of the storyline, a result which pleased us, as it meant we had done a satisfactory job of trying to edit the video into an understandable storyline after we had to make somecritical changes.