Final Music Video

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LAUREN'S EVALUATION QUESTION BLOG

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Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The target audience for our music video & ancillary products were teenage girls/young female adults ranging from the ages of 13-20s. We have presented the singer for a female audience, rather than a male audience. We chose not to portray her as sexualised as we didn't want to show this image for our video song in particular as it doesn't suggest that type of image. I think that whatever age or gender the audience is doesn't particularly matter as it is a pop genre song, which suggests that many people will like it, not a specific audience. Through looking from our feedback, we have learned that the colour theme that we chose was very consistent throughout all of our ancillary products. After our first rough cut, we were told that we needed to shorten our sequences, and we did that and then looked at other audience feedback.



Who was your target audience?
Our target audience was mainly a teenage girl audience; however we chose to interview a few males too because we wanted to see how they interpreted the music video and our ancillary products. This interview was for our final product.


Planning
We planned what our CD was going to look like by doing sketches. This is one of our initial designs drawn by Lauren:

We have kept the similar design on the inner left side and the back cover where we collate all the songs together. We changed the part where the CD goes and the front cover as we all participated into what we liked and didn't and what we think could be improved. We used these to help us think of what a successful digipack would look like. We then started to take pictures and edit them on picmonkey to see what colours and how we wanted to lay it all out as we wanted to be very consistent in our colours and how the same theme was portrayed throughout.

Wordle

We each had a separate piece of paper and wrote down words that we thought linked with the song, including some lyrics from the song. We collated these inside a wordle and the more the words were repeated the bigger they were and more prominent in the picture. This helped us pick up on a particular theme and which parts of the song we needed to have seen as more memorable from the audience.





Audience Opinions
Before creating the music video we asked for audience opinions on the song and how they think we should present the singer and what they could expect in the video. We took these opinions into account and developed them further with our own ideas. This helped us produce something that in the outcome the audience will like.



Surveymonkey Results
This is our results from our surveymonkey questionnaire, where we asked a general audience what they would expect from a pop/concept genre music video. From the graph below that surveymonkey generated, it shows that just under half of the audience listens to pop remix genre. Using this questionnaire was helpful in the fact that we were able to take the audience's ideas and develop them even more to how we also think our clips should fit with the music.

Interim Evaluations

Facebook

We uploaded our digipack image to Facebook, this way we were able to receive feedback on what they thought of it. One person commented and said "this is too cute, I love the colours ahhhhh and Lauren looks amaze as per," their comment suggests we chose well for our album, also suggesting that we have targeted a correct audience. We decided not to make any changes as the audience seemed to really like the way that we had presented our artist and the way that we had laid out the images on the digipack.















YouTube Comments

Unfortunately, from the profiles of people who comment, it is hard to tell what type of audience watched the video, however they fitted into the category of a female young adult. Having YouTube comments from the public means that we can also understand what they like and dislike about the video. In this case, we received some criticism, "I don't like the beginning, I feel that it's too rushed and the images don't flow well. Otherwise, it's good, keep up the good work," which is really helpful for us to re think and re edit what needs to be done to please the audience. This was taken from one of our first rough cuts and therefore we have accepted this and tried to work harder on our opening.

In this screenshot, we changed the opening by editing it with different clips until we thought it was better than the original version. We thought that having the same forest clip worked well with some jump cuts in between to introduce the concept editing genre. We then applied some more overlays but in different places and have tried to edit the video clips along to the beat a little more precisely than before. 

Peer Evaluations

These are peer evaluations from our second draft of the video. We were able to take these comments and use them to improve our music video even more. They have told us to shorten some sequences and make some more sped up cuts. They also suggested the use of another mask, but we didn't think that it was necessary as we thought it would get a little more confusing.

Change 1 - Sped up clips

In this part of the video just as the chorus has begun, we decided to cut the clips to the beat as it sped up. We repeated this for the second chorus too, and the ending after the bridge as it showed a strong effect of women empowerment. The use of speeding up the clips made the video have more variety in what clips we could use, and made it more interesting.

Change 2 - Shortening sequences

At the end of our video from our first rough cut there was one long clip of Lauren with the split screen effect; however the audience thought it became a little too repetitive throughout the whole of the video, and we agreed, so we applied some different clips in between and we made sure that some clips weren't too long that didn't stand out too badly.




Final Feedback

Finally, we asked a group of people on what they thought about our music video and what they liked about it and if our ancillary products matched with the music video and if it flowed together. Some comments were that:

• It was creative and showed a strong message.
• The editing fitted well with the music beat.
• Really liked the overlays and the ink dripping

Summary
The audience feedback was really helpful because it meant that we were able to know what we have done right - including targeting the correct audience, even though we asked several males too as we wanted to know what they might have thought of the video.

Evaluation Q3 - Lauren

What did you learn from your audience research?

I think that one of the most important things that can influence the success of ancillary products is if it is liked by the target audience. In our case, our target audience is aiming towards teenage girls due to the colour pink we have used in our CD digipack and magazine advert, as well as the bright colours and flowers used in the music video. However we could also argue that teenagers of both genders could be the target audience because after interviewing some teenage males we found that they understood the underlying theme in our music video.

Researching Target Audience

Planning
To plan for the design of our CD digipack, each member of my group brought some designs and I sketched some designs for initial ideas. To decide on a final idea we posted the designs to our Facebook page and got some audience feedback on what our target audience liked. This was very helpful as it made it easier for a final decision to be made. For our final design we used the main ideas from my sketches and incorporated other ideas from alternative designs, for example we added the roses to the final design. Also to plan our music video we researched other CD digipacks that were of a pop genre such as Adele 25 that had Adele's face on the front cover in black and white and Rihanna's ablum Loud which also features her face on the front cover . This one was one of the main reasons we chose to present the artist on the front cover, but also on the other sides of the digipack so that she was easily recognisable for the target audience.

Using Wordle really helped to my develop ideas. Each member of my group wrote down a few words that represented our theme and our music video. For example, I wrote words such as love, war and colour. The wordle helped us decide on the main context of our music video because after we had written all the words, we came together and typed all of them into wordle, even if the word was repeated. When then looking at the wordle we could clearly see which words were the most common and could help us decide our final concept. The word love came up three times which indicated that we should incorporate the theme of relationships in our music video as it is one of the most popular themes that artists sing about, especially broken relationships or fighting for love. We found through doing this that our song links to fighting for love with the use of a lot of words such as 'bleed', 'guns' and 'bang.'

To plan for our music video we also did audience expectation interviews by letting people from our target audience listen to our song, 'war paint,' to get their initial thoughts on what our music video should include. Some of the suggestions that were made did in fact influence some of our final decisions because it is important that our target audience like the ideas. Most people suggested the common conventions of a pop music video such as using a performance genre where the artist is seen singing in the video as well as a lot of people mentioning using colour.




Our Survey Monkey results were quite surprising, for example in one of the questions, 'do you listen to pop remix regularly?' 33% said yes and 22% said no, however, 44% said other genre therefore for the particular group of teenagers that filled in the questionnaire listened to other genres other than pop. This suggests that we should target our music video at a slightly younger age and therefore conduct some more research on our type of audience.

Interim Evaluations
We set up a Facebook page during the creation of music video where we mainly posted photos of ideas we had to get audience feedback, for example in the image below we posted a photo of our final digipack design and gained some positive feedback from a female teenager in our target age group. It was also helpful to have a Facebook page because it mean my group and I could also discuss ideas on the page and post ideas that we had so we could get each others insights.

My group and I created a Youtube account that we all had access to, therefore it was easy to post our experiments of editing. These tryouts of editing techniques would also be shown to our peers and target audience to make sure that we were on the right track when creating our music video. A member of our class picked up on, during watching a small section we filmed, that the image we recorded was slightly grainy as we only used artificial light rather than natural lighting. This was very helpful as we had not noticed this before so I found that using youtube to how people our music video was very effective because it gave us the opportunity to show people who had never seen any of the clips to see it for the first time and notice things from a new perspective.

Final Feedback
We interviewed a lot of people from our target audience and found that most of them were very positive about the music video which suggests that we were successful in pleasing our target audience. As a group we were also very happy that many of our audience understood the theme of girl power which was one of our main intentions.

Summary
Overall, our

Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation 2