Evaluation | What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

When looking at audience feedback we had to make sure we got it from the right people. When beginning to create the video we looked and created our target audience who would be the people that we aimed our video at. We chose to look at students from the age of 14 to around 25 who were social and spent a moderate amount on time and absorbing the media.

We tried to gather audience feedback right from the beginning of our editing process. We did this in order to check if any parts of our video needed to be changed. We'd show a number of people one of our drafts and take notes on what they said. We'd then permit their changes to our video to see if it made an improvement, if we liked it we kept it if not we changed it back. We did this a number of times until we had no more criticisms from the people we showed. The comments people made are listed below:

• the main thing it the lyrical part of the video has been drawn in this one and we've decided it would look better if it was computer generated. It will look a lot neater and follow the conventions of others.

• the part of the video that is closest to lip syncing where the main talent is on the phone we also thought needed changing. The last part of this section goes on for too long and we think it will lose the attention of the audience

• Towards the start of the clip there are the lyrics 'I don't drink like everybody else, I do it to forget things about myself'. Originally we planned to have the beer cans jump cut section to appear here but in editing that never worked. We want to actually change this now as when we showed someone they picked up on it and suggested we change it.

• We also want to put in the voice and words you hear when you leave a voice mail when the main actor begins to speak in his phone

• The sign that Ash is holding at the ending also needs meaning to be put in it. It is the 'I <3 you' sign that is featured throughout but we got feedback that said we should just be reminded of this at the end. To get around this we will be putting a clip of the sign where you can read what it says in Claudia's flashbacks

• Feedback also showed us that the lyric section shouldn't move and instead the stills should be still with no ken burns effect on them, when looking at this again we agreed so our next draft will just contain the part being still

After we had made this changes our target audience were pleased and 95% of them enjoyed the video and 76% said they would watch it again! We tried to gather whether people understood the story behind the video and everyone we asked gave a roundabout answer as to what we intended apart from one person who thought they were brother and sister (why brothers and sisters would kiss like that baffled me but still, each to their own). 
I then proceeded to ask some people who weren't in my target audience to see if they enjoyed the video as well. I asked a selection of adults and younger children. Most adults said they enjoyed it and that it was worth watching and complimented the video nicely. It was brought up though that things like Twitter and Facebook are a foreign land to them so that part of the video seemed a little weird. 

The younger audiences that we asked didn't really like the video as they said it was dull and boring, apart from the doodle part which they said was fun! This would be the response I expect because the video isn't really meant to be visually pleasing but instead portray the story of the song, something younger audiences wouldn't understand. 

This was a really important thing for us to do because what is a media piece without an audience, we created our video for the purpose of promoting the song and artist and their would be no point to it. One thing that I've looked at is a theory by Deborah Knight who notes that satisfaction is guaranteed with genre and that the deferral of the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of prolonged anticipation (1994). This means that audiences will actually like to have an idea of what is happening and with this comes another theory by todorov who suggested that narratives follow a certain pattern every time. He stated that all stories will start will equilibrium where everything is normal, there will then be some sort of disruption which will create a conflict. A resolution with then be found creating a new equilibrium.

Our music video follows this pattern with our equilibrium at the start being the couple in a relationship, happy, we don’t see this at the start of the video but actually throughout the opening sequence through flashbacks. We then see that the disruption is that the girl is leaving for Uni, I would then say the conflict was the fact the couple will have to break up because of the disruption. The resolution is the last thing we see and is the fact that the boy is waiting for her when she is about to leave, she then runs over and hugs the boy. This is the only glimpse of the new equilibrium we get as the video finishes here but this was done purposefully so that the audience could make up their own ideas on what happens with the couple. 

Leaving it open also allows the audience to identify with the situation more as they can add in their own ending. This links into the idea of identification for personal identity being one of the audiences uses & gratifications as proposed by Bulmer and Katz. The audience will use the video to identify with themsleves, whether they have been in similar situations or whether they feel as though they are similar to the characters used.
Now I'm straying from the actual question asked! But I think we can learn as much from theories that we can from asking actual people. Though as said before audience feedback was really important during the on going process of our video as it allowed us to find out what bits weren't as good which we wouldn't have necassarily seen by ourselves! We would then make these changes and show a few more people to see if there were any more changes. We finally stopped this when people didn't have anything else they wanted to change. I think this was a much better was to do it than collecting lots of data once we'd finished our videos. At AS when I had finished my coursework I created questionnaires and asked people's opinions on my work, this led to me having lots of things that could be changed but I had fininshed so it was quite hard to do. Doing it this way in a less formal matter by just showing people the video and asking their opinion on it worked a lot better and produced a much higher standard of work in my opinion.

Evaluation | How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

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

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

In what ways does your media product USE forms and conventions of real media products?

This video displays where in existing texts you can find some on the ideas or themes we used. Although all of the videos may not be specifically from the indie genre a lot of music video conventions are transferable across genres. You will also notice that we haven't copied them exactly, well obviously cause then it wouldn't be our video! But we did note that it's important to draw good ideas from other videos into your own as long as you put your own 'mark' on it so to say. These are all technical codes as it's all about editing, below I have written about how these techniques may be decoded by the audience (because this is what we intended when encoding them)

• Jump cuts - We used this editing technique to symbolise the passing of time and to represent him drinking his sorrows in a more humorous than serious way
• Slow motion - This editing technique was put in to make the flow of emotion happier after the believed sadness of the phone call of him expressing his love etc.. and to give the representation of the moment going slow for the girl after realising that her and Ash, the main character, were meant to be together. 
• Use of props - We really like the 'I <3 you' sign that is used in taylor swifts video and wanted to see if we could integrate this into our own work. We also wanted like a common symbol that would be used more than once in the video to create continuity. We also used this as the <3 is symbolic of love and the sign may also create connotations of love letters. This is known as symbolic coding and is used to present the audience with symbols to decode to achieve specific results
• Slow motion animation - This was used in our video as its becoming an Internet sensation! I personally have been fascinated by stop motion for some time and so always wanted to incorporate it in my work but when 'lyric videos' started to appear online in which lyrics and animations were displayed on screen using a set of stop motion clips I thought we'd be able to use it as well! So because it was becoming popular and is fairly modern we thought it a good idea to include it.

When looking at other videos I thought about how much time can sometimes be shown in as little as 2 minutes. I think this is a great feature of music videos and decided to look into it some more. I found a theory by Bordwell and Thompson that said with moving image there are often 3 different durations; story, plot and screen. In context of our video the screen duration is around 3 minutes, the plot duration could be a weekend or a single day and the story duration will have stretched to however long the couple were going out. This would be quite typical time frames for similar music videos and so this is another way we've kept to conventions.

Another convention that we've kept is the story it's self. Ed Sheeran's song is quite lovey dovey and so the story needed to represent this and not have psycho killers with chainsaws as it just wouldn't fit the genre. Instead we needed to convey a happy story. We obviously didn't do this from the start as that would be silly and the video would be boring and make people want to puke. What we actually decided to do was signify a break up the whole way through until pretty much the last few seconds in which the audience would see the happy ending. One of the main reasons for doing this is because an audience pleasure in music videos is escapism from the real world, this means the audience don't want to be left with tears in their eyes but smiling.

Something that people tend to not think too much about is the actors in the video. An extremely important convention in my eyes is to use quite attractive and desirable actors as, to put it simply, people don't want to watch ugly people. The audience will want to see people in the video that they can relate to but then also that they can aspire to be like. This is especially true with our target audience being around student again as they are influenced significantly by the media and so want respectable role models.

In what ways does your media product DEVELOP forms and conventions of real media products?

We looked into some ideas that may not actually be in music video's but in other moving images and then touched upon in music video's. An example of this is the cross dissolve that we use here..

We couldn't actually find like an exact example of this is any music video's that we had watched BUT we did see simplified versions that we developed on to get this as a result. We used this effect to signify past and present and the transition between them as this technique represents the passing of time. Removing the girl from the shot shows that the boy is now alone and represents their break-up.

Although we used the idea of the slow motion animation in how we used forms and conventions it can also go with the idea that we developed them. This is because you will normally see a video with pure animation or pure narrative/performance, not normally a mixture of the two. We decided to merge the two just to see what it looked like and to see if it worked and we and our audience believe it does. Having the animation between some of the narrative splits the video up and gives its more visual dynamics. We needed something to split up our narrative as we decided not to include any performance in the video and didn't want to bore the audience with pure narrative.

In what ways does you media product CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?

This is a major convention that we went against and we decided to do this because we followed in Ed Sheerans previous ideas. In Ed Sheerans first video 'The A Team' he used complete narrative and only appeared in it himself for about a second. This video was hugely popular gaining views to date. With Ed Sheeran not being in it there is obviously no lip syncing or performance. Although we did challenge this convention we did try to include an aspect of it by having Ash mouth the words for the 'voicemail' on the song. This wasn't meant to mimic lip syncing though and was meant to signify that these were the words he was saying to Claudia. 

I tried to think of more ways in which we would have challenged the conventions but then realised why would we have? Although in my opinion challenging conventions is an essential part of music videos or in fact any media texts developing you can't challenge them too much. People like familiarity, they sometimes like to know whats coming, which seems boring but its true. If you're watching a rom com film you want there to be a happy ending cause it's what you expect, you don't want them to both get run over and die. So in this respect challenging say one convention in a video is useful because if no one ever changed anything then everything would just be the same and never modify, but simple changes is what brings about new ideas and variety. 

Evaluation Questions

• 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 media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The final magazine poster!

We changed our design to this as we wanted all of our designs had more of a running theme. As the poster was meant to be promoting the album we found it necessary to have the album cover featured on here. We came to this conclusion by looking in magazines at advertisements and noticed the constant appearance.

Magazine Poster Alterations

When looking at this again and in conjunction with our Digipak we're not too sure whether it fits the scheme that we were going for. We tried to keep similarites such as the blue in the colour scheme and we also used the same font used in the Digipak but we're not sure as to whether this is a great enough link. Following this we decided to play around with some other things such as using images from our Digipak and ideas from the video to create...

This poster incorporates the images used on the cover and backcover as well as a still taken from the video. We again used the font that we have used throughout the project as well as using the similar blue that we used in the Digipak.