Evaluation question 3: What have you learned from audience feedback?

I felt it was very helpful working as a pair, as I always felt regardless of who came up with the idea, there was always a secondary opinion which I felt really strengthened our final product. We were able to balance each others ideas with feedback from the planning stages right up to the final stages of editing. Although the ideas that we originally planned changed and developed through and beyond the planning stage, we were able to manouevre the development relatively easily within the treatment because the basis of our music video was meant to convey to the art house genre. As a creative team, we complimented each other well and had a good balance of talents between us - my partner has a particularly strong expertise within the whole area of music and the industry which was vital in our partnership whilst I used my technical ability with a camera and using the software for the editing as together I felt on balance our roles in the group were fairly and equally distributed as together our ideas built together were able to be covered on the construction stages.

My role was to co-produce a music video that was going to look clean cut, aesthetically visual and convey to a look that would trend with the codes and conventions of a music video. Furthermore, my partners area of expertise and prime focus in music meant that we were able to choreograph a realistic studio and performance whilst being in control of the photography, I went a long with the flow of the

performance and studio to shoot our footage with innovation to bring excitement and a fun feel because our music video is written by a ‘young indie band who appeal as a stylish band with fun music’. So together as partners we effectively co-produced and co-directed our product as I felt the balance worked very well.

I felt we learned a lot from the audience feedback and as we may have seemed naïve in our approach at the early stages of filming the performance when constructive feedback given by some fellow students broadly mentioned that the look of the stage performance seemed very static and lacked energy, like Robert Palmer’s video- Addicted to Love. When hearing this feedback, we both felt that this was clearly not what we wanted our music video to portray.

Furthermore, my partner used his vast expertise and researched videos from Youtube by legendary bands such as The Who, Blur and The Strokes to give our music video less of a focus on style and more on the substance and energy that we wanted to portray. In fact I think this feedback was very helpful and the second shoot for the stage performance was a big success, in fact we asked for feedback from the same people we had asked before, and they all felt that the choreography had much more energy and excitement.

Overall there was generally positive feedback about the studio shoot scenes, however the viewers in our audience pointed out and stressed that the lighting was poor inside the recording booth. Our solution to this was too improve the lighting using after effects as well as reshoot some parts that could resolve this problem. The dull lighting in these scenes works very effectively now when it is juxtaposed with the stage performance

because the lighr ting on the stage is very warm, colourful and gives that dreamy exciting energy which we want to contrast in the studio narrative.

The ‘slinky toy’ stop-frame animation scene was responded in having great potential and was a good idea however the audience generally felt that it needed to have more of an impact somehow. Some suggestions included for example having some sort of multi coloured stairs to make it more exciting visually. So we went back and reshot this using a new ‘colourful’ slinky toy and a different setting because apparently it looked ‘dull and too plain’, achieving a much stronger and visual result.

Finally, the final closing two scenes in our video (after the vinyl stops - the band disintegration) were unclear and untogether. One idea was too switch the vinyl with the band disintegration as some viewers felt that the vinyl stopping was very misleading as they thought the music video had ended here.  Furthermore there appeared to be a very dissorganised sequence in which we need to bridge the gap between the band leaving the stage and the match in the studio. We were aware of these issues so we had to compile some more footage to blend the sequence together to make a clear indication of the juxtaposition.

Despite this constructive feedback for our first draft of the music video, we have received very positive feedback of the our product. Here our some screenshots of what people have said on our YouTube Channel about our music video.