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

Evalaution 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The initial target audience for this project was teenage girls ranging from the ages of 13 to early twenties. We created the image of our artist to appeal more to women than men, this was done with fashion. For example, we didn't use revealing clothing which would otherwise attract men. Furthermore, although the age gap of the target audience is wide, we were mostly focusing on attracting mid-teens. This is because the message we wanted to portray to them is more relevant to mid-teens than any other age. However, I believe that our music video is accessible to most age ranges, especially if the person's taste in music visuals is connected to pretty aesthetics.

Research

We wanted to research more about current audience activities in the general public. What we have found are Vlogs. Vlogs are used by the audience to promote certain music videos such as reaction videos, and I see that media industries have used this as a way of publicizing th

eir media products.

Reaction videos are a great way of publishing a music video. They are viral, meaning that they reach audiences in a global scale. They can also create a hype for the music video/artist, which can help promote music videos. However, bad reviews can equally be bad for the artist.
We also researched a lot of other promotion techniques. A personal favourite of mine is behind the scenes clips. I think they help let the audience get a personal glimpse of the artist's personality and not just the image that we've created to promote the music video. We have put images of this throughout the music video, although they are implanted within the music video to create the image of the artists. For example laughing clips.


This is a behind the scene clip. We used this to help publicise out music video to our audience.

Another thing we have researched are charts. We wanted to see what types of music genres are currently popular within society. We concluded it was pop. This is an advantage for our artists style and song because it means that the majority of society like her types of song. This also meant that referencing for other music video genres are available online, as they are popular. This helped us get an idea of what the audience were expected from an image type music video. And also come up with ideas of popular concepts e.g. flowers from Zayn's video Pillowtalk...

Planning
Class Sketches

This is this part of our class sketches for our digipack. We did one sketch each, then showed each other our ideas in the end. This way we could generate more than one idea, and combine what we liked from each other. We also had peer evaluation where we showed our sketches to our peers, and they give us an evaluation of what works and what doesn't.

In the end we went for Lauren's design, changing little bits like the front colour and inside left cover. We tried to implement the flowers in too, as it's part of our brand image and connects the 2 other media products together.

We also did this for our magazine advert.

Our peers told us to not use digipact cover on our magazine as it looks too repetitive. We took this advise.

And also they said to use the same format for the name and song title as on the front cover of our digipack. This was so that we can be consistent, and start to create our brand image.  

Wordle/World Cloud

We used this world cloud to create our theme. We did this by showing this world cloud to our peers, and talking to them about our music video. They then gave us feedback about what they think would work best. In the end we went for the theme of love and war, with the help of our peer reviews.  

Audience Interviews and Pitch Feedback

For the Preliminary Task we have interviewed 3 people (from 05:16 minutes onwards). We made them listen to our initial song choice. And then asked them about their expectations: Locations, Mise-en-scene (clothing, props...), and genre. From this we concluded that the audience was expecting more of an image based genre which focused on the artist. They also linked the idea of spectacle due to the upbeat nature of the song. In terms or mise-en-scene the audience wanted to see glamourous clothing. We used these ideas in our final music video, creating an image and spectacle based video while also building the artist's image with the use of glamorous clothing.


Survey Monkey Results

This is part of our results from our Survay Monkey Interview, where we asked the general internet audience what they would expect from a pop genre music video. This shows that over 50% of the audience do listen to pop genre, and also what they expect from pop genre music video. This was helpful in generating ideas for our music video. For example for editing, like montage editing and locations; using nature/ woods as one of the main locations.     

Interim Evaluations
Facebook

On Facebook we have uploaded updates of our Final Design pieces, like our digipack. Using social media is helpful for connecting with the target audience. We can also get feedback from them. For example this certain person who commented on our picture giving us positive feedback. This shows that we have created a design which attracts target audience.

YouTube comments

This comment is from our first rough cut video. We used this feedback as a way to progress. So then we went back and edited our opening sequence again, made it simpler and created a build up at the end.  
Peer Evaluations

These are peer evaluation, during out 2nd draft of out music video. Here they commented how we needed to improve such as shortening some clips. We've taken this advise and went back to edit our sequence. I think this has helped improve our work significantly.

Final Feedback


This video is the final feedback for all our media products. We got mostly positive comments, including:

• message of female empowerment came across to the audience (message conveyed from the series of girls putting on paint on their faces)
• Music video: each scene flowed well, and they style was consistent
• colour and flowers, as one of the main element that stood out for people
• all media products linked well with each other, this was don't mostly with the theme of flowers and colours
• well edited (transitions, overlays, ink, effects)
• location choices linked well with the song

We also used the last minute feedback to retouch edit out music video a little more. This was mostly to clean-up certain layering, so it was consistent.
Summary
Ultimately, our audience feedback helped us to refine all our media products. Especially from our initial design to our final design, which can be seen from our digipack and magazine advert. I believe that the audience's comments are important as it's their expectations we are meeting. We tried to meet our audience expectations without limiting our own creativity and ideas.   

Interviews

Evaluation Q1 - Lauren

Evaluation Q4 - Lauren (Prezi)

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation 1

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Script Draft

Our music video shows a very strong, current theme of girl power and how that strengthens confidence through actions. This is portrayed through the lyrics too as it links to how the singer is building herself up from a possible male character that is bringing her down. “I’ll rub the colours on my face it prove.” This line from the song suggests that she is trying to put a front on to make herself stand up for everything. We have shown this through the use of paints being used on her face. Furthermore, the visual of the castle grounds – “this castle’s been surrounded, won’t stay to watch it fall around us”. At the end of the video we have made Lauren have more emotion in her facial expression to suggest how hurt the character might have been – “I’ll draw my knife for you,” The links to lyrics and visuals is repeated “red on the ground”, ironically we have chosen to use blooming flowers, making it look beautiful.  The linking of visuals and lyrics means that we can link to the use of Goodwin’s rules to make the music video more successful to our audience so that they can understand the video and song.

We decided to choose the remixed version of the song “War Paint” because it meant that we were able to experiment more with the editing – especially with the music beat. There are elements of the music video where we have edited the video clips along to the beat of the music, this way we are making the video seem more interesting and eye catching for the audience and this is seen a lot in modern remix pop genre music videos.

The artist in our video has to be represented in a specific way of being outgoing and confident. We have used this to send out a message to specifically girls and women. Our record label as we have stated on the blog has expectations of the artist to reach in the top 40 in the charts from their first album release, and we have tried to do this by making the song have a powerful visual message. We have also chosen that the song is in the pop genre, which is the most listened to in any audience. We have thought that the artist should link to a well known artist and work their music in a similar style, but in keeping with their own persona. Our artist is quite similar to the likes of Taylor Swift with the love song types and Mr Probz with the same beat of music.

From these clips you can see that we have used a variety of locations, here we have chosen to use Waverly Abbey as it was very picturesque area that fitted well with parts of the lyrics, “this castle’s been surrounded.” We have also used a small room in our school, which has a plain background that made it simple for us and so we could use the neon paints. This way it wouldn’t be too crowded.

In our music video I have used a variety of editing skills to create a widely different video, including the flipped screen effect, overlaying etc. The overlaying includes a lot of flowers, we have thought of this idea through looking at other music videos, in which this is especially used in ‘Pillowtalk’ by Zayn. We have also used a range of different shot types from close ups to tracking and panning to make sure that the video has a variety.

In the clips where Lauren is positioned in the white room we used light umbrellas and placed them behind the camera, so that the light was facing her. In the rest of the clips we were lucky enough to have natural lighting, which was very similar on the different days that we filmed, making the video flow a lot more.

We chose to have simple, but fashion statement clothing – the black top contrasted well with the white background and the use of neon colours that were painted on the singer’s face. We repeated this in the location scenes, however we chose to pair it with a fluffy green jacket and silver trousers to make her stand out.

Our digipack has a pastel pink tone contrasting with the black and white colours. I designed the front cover and achieved this by taking a photo of Lauren using a plain wall. I edited the photo of her on picmonkey, I edited the image so that it was black and white, and then coloured out the plain wall and replaced it in a pastel pink so it was concise with the rest of the album. I added some text to create the name of the artist and the title for the album, and again to keep it consistent, we all used the same font. For the front cover I followed the codes and conventions of a CD cover by having a picture of the artist, the title of the album and the name of the artist.

The magazine advert also follows the same consistency in the colour theme of the digipack, however we have changed the lettering to be white because we didn’t want it to look too dark. We have also added the quote that we have put in the inside cover. We have layered the rose in the background too. We have followed the conventions of the magazine advert in a way that we haven’t included too much text as we don’t want to crowd the page. We have added the record label and the date of the album release too, therefore letting the audience know when the CD would be available.

Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation 4- How did you use media technologies in the construction and reseach, planning and evaluation stages?

Final Magazine Advert Design

We believe that this magazine advert portrays the

Music Video Draft

Inside CD Cover

 

We decided to have three separate images and put them in a collage for the inside cover in the digipack. This evolved from our original idea to have identical pictures, but in this case they are different to create a variety of personalities. We wanted to keep the colour scheme consistent throughout the CD digipack.

Final Digipack Design

Ideas for Magazine Advert

This is my draft for the magazine advert. I kept it simple and used a muted colour scheme compared to the original album design.

I used the typical codes and conventions: such as the big picture of the artists, name, and album name, release date, and record company. I also added a quote to attract the target audience, and it also gives a taster of what the songs within the album is like. And then I added a picture of the album, as this artists is still unknown it would be best to make links so she's recognisable.

Inside Right of CD

I started with a picture of a red rose that I took. Then I went on pic-monkey. Here I used exposure to change the picture, by making the shadows darker (which gives the rose the look of more depth). Then I put a square overlay on top of the flower: coloured it pink and faded it. The effect of this is that it makes the flower more pinky than red, which matches the rest of the covers of this album. Then put another overlay of a faded pink circle, to represent where the CD goes. Then on the website I found a picture of a pink rose, which I then used as a faded overlay on top of the red.  

Lauren's Evalution Q1 Script

Evaluation Question 1

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

Script for the Music Video

In this directors cut I will be discussing how our music video and media products develop and challenge the forms and conventions of real life media. We have chosen the song ‘War Paint’ by an unsigned artist called Fletcher. We decided that that the main theme of the song was about a girl’s confidence and that makeup makes a girl more confident.  This idea came about from the lyrics of the song, ‘watch me put my war paint on’. The artist is possibly suggesting the war paint is makeup. The theme of girl power is common convention in the charts at the moment with artists such as Little Mix releasing songs such as ‘Shout out to my ex’, which develops the themes of real music videos in the charts. To reinforce the message of war paint we also linked the lyrics to the visuals by buying aluminous face paint that the artist puts on during the music video.

An editing technique that is often a convention of current music videos is cutting to the beat. I believe we successfully showed this is in and section of the song where the pace of the music rises very quickly and the words, ‘you, you, you, you’ are repeated many times. In this particular section we decided to ask some of our peers if they would like to be used in the music video so that it was not just our artist and there was a wide variation of people. It is popular to use backing dancers or other people in many music videos such as Arianna Grande’s video ‘Side to Side’. It is also one of Goodwin’s rules to cut to the beat therefore it is used in many big star artists music videos.

The genre of our song is pop. This genre is the most common genre in the charts at the moment, for example in the Spotify top 50, Rockabye, a pop song,  has been number 1 for at least 3 weeks. We decided that the song would revolve around the theme of confidence and girl power. Songs about relationships are found to be the most popular narrative therefore we decided there would be an underlying theme of recovering after a breakup. We chose to create our music video theme around concept and performance. This allowed us to be creative with our editing techniques and locations. Our main locations were Waverley Abbey grounds and Fairlands forest as well as the green screen. We decided to use the Abbey castle ground because of the particular lyric, ‘this castle’s been surrounded’ therefore we are linking the lyrics to the visuals. We thought the forest would also be a pretty locations that would allow us to have a variety of shot types, for example crab shots through the leaves as well as establishing and tracking shots. It is a common convention of a pop music video to use a variety of different locations for example in the music video for Starving by Hailee Steinfield.

After researching a variety of pop genre music videos we wanted our artist to look dressed up so that attention was drawn to her. The outfits included a main colour of black in every outfit and other items such as silver trousers, doc martins. We also wanted to keep the artists look consistent therefore she always had the same hairstyle and reasonably similar makeup. This would particularly challenge the common conventions of a music video because an artist such as Lady Gaga who shares the same concept theme would have a variety of around 4 or 5 outfits that all have different colour schemes hair styles and makeup. This may be because big name stars have a very large budget where they are not limited to one style of costume.

For our Mis-en scene we also used the reoccurring theme of one main prop, a venetian mask. This prop was used to support the theme of a girl hiding herself when she isn’t wearing makeup which is a popular thing in today’s modern society therefore we thought it would sympathise with a modern audience of young girls. The song however also supports the message that its ok to wear makeup if it makes you feel confident. Having just one prop challenges the conventions of a common music video because the budget of music videos created by big recording agencies is usually quite large therefore they usually use many extreme and crazy props, for example in Lady Gaga’s bad romance she has lots of coffins that open up and let dancers out.

The mask was a symbolic code for confidence by putting on your makeup, or war paint you suddenly feel so much better in yourself. There are theorists such as Laura Mulvey that have theory’s such as ‘the male gaze’ which suggests that film represents women as passive objects of male desire and John Berger that said women are solely there for objectification of women within all platforms of media. Our song choice and music video go against these two theorists and present women in a confident way. This was also done by inviting our peers to join in with our music video as we had about 15 people put on the aluminous facepaint as we filmed them supporting our main theme of girl power.

As part of our course we also created a CD digi pack. I was put in charge of designing and creating the back cover of the CD that included the song list. I designed it to look fun and appealing for a younger audience therefore I had a silly photo booth style collage in the background which I edited in black and white. When discussing ideas with my group we decided that black and white would be a consistant theme on the front and the back of the digipack as well and the colour pink. To keep the colour scheme consistant I created a pink circle in the middle of the back cover however faded it out slightly so that you could still see the images in the back ground and the text written with the song list. We had a consistant font on the front and the back of the cover as well. I researched some pop album back covers and found that many had their song list in the center such as Ellie Gouldings album , Lights. This suggests that it is a common convention of a CD digipack. However to challenge this convention I decided to not have a distinctive list but space the songs all around the circle, one underneath the other so that it was till clear, and I kept the same font however changed the sizes.