Final edit of the music video

Here is the final edit of our music video for Cohesion's Positive-post-negative.

Evaluation of the Project as a Whole

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:
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
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?

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?

Feedback for our Print and Video tasks

To try and assess who our target audience would be, Adam and I had to ensure we got a 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 Analysis Questionnaire - Final Draft #2

Adam and I have developed and improved the questionnaire that we will give to our target audience to gain feedback on their thoughts and ideas. We also 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 Analysis Questionnaire - First Draft #1

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?

Magazine advertisment flat plans #1

For our print task, we produced four individual flatplans for our work. My working partner Adam Lawson worked on producing two, and I also worked on producing two, so that we had a variety of different ideas intergrated across the four different design styles.The two which I 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 Adam, 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.

Progress Report #1

Over half term, we gained feedback from our lecturer, on ways in which we were on target at this point in the project, but also, ways in which we can improve our performance. Currently, we are predicted to be around the A/B borderline, however, if we apply the changes we have been told to add, we hope that we will result in a solid A grade.

Script Change #1 & Audience Research #1

Script Change

Due to filming and cast complications we have had to rewrite a section of the script of the music video. It was originally planned that:

"[Female Character] is hanging out with her friends ([Female character's friends]) in one of her friend's houses, laughing and having fun. [Female Character] then receives a text message from a member of Cohesion, asking for [Female Character] to come to the bands practice room as they miss her and want to see each other again. This maybe due to a fallen out between the band and [Female Character] or another reason, no reason is to be specified in said text message. [Female Character] leaves her friends to go see the band happily, showing she is looking forward to meeting up with them."

- link to blog post from which the previous paragraph was extracted

However, due to problems with cast avaliablilty, we have had to rewite this section of the narrative to allow for only the [Female Character] to be featured. We have now changed the plot to feature:

[Female Character] is alone at home watching television. She then gets a call from a member of the band [Caller] (or another person, not pivotal to the plot) . [Female Character] and [Caller] then have an arguement over the phone at which [Female Character] then becomes very distressed at, throwing her phone away in anger and collapsing in a slump on the floor. she then looks over to the phone and picks it up again in a calmer manner, she talks to [Caller] again and then smiles, all has been settled and forgiven between the pair.

Audience Research

Because of the change in the script we then decided to show possible audience members about whether the new scene made sense and was contingent with the rest of the narrative. So once filmed and edited into the music video we showed three people the new story in verse one (this is where the narrative first begins) , the chorus which features no narrative shots (used to simbolise a passing of time between verse one and verse two), and verse two (which is where the narrative continues on the next day). All five people suffered no confussion or misunderstanding with the difference of time and setting. Every person we showed it to said that they believed it just continued from a following day and that they thought the video ran smoothly.

Inspiration for a music album advertisment #1

This is an advertisment for "Foo Fighters" latest album "Wasting Light". The advert features one main concept which is the album art for the new album. This image covers the entirity of the page and is the main focal point of the advertisment. There are then the band's and album's details on top of the image in a bold, white font, contrasting to the images black background, enforcing the text further. The main text, in order of size, goes from the band's name, to the album's title, to the album's release date, to what singles are including on the album. Then in a less bold and smaller font, as well as a bleaker font colour and at the base of the advert, the producer and mixer are credited. And again in a smaller font, links to the website and social network pages on the band are stated. Then in each of the bottom corners there is an advertisment of a company that sells music, and in the other corner the record label of the band is credited.

I think this advertisment is a good layout and the designer has made good work of colour coding and sizing the objects. And I definatly agree to using the album's artwork as the main feature or at least an image that is very similar to the artwork.

Cohesion Demo

Here is a demo recording of "Major 9" from the band I'll be using called "Cohesion". Although this is not the song I have decided to work with, listening to it can give you an idea of the style of music the band plays.