Question 4 - Evaluation

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Question 3 - Evaluation

Media Evaluation – Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When creating our music promo and ancillaries we relied heavily on our audience’s feedback because it is essential to listen to ideas of our specific audience and make changes accordingly to suit their needs to help keep our audience happy by incorporating into our production and ancillaries what our audience expects to see. It wasn’t just in our production of the music promo and ancillaries when we asked for their feedback; we started in the research by producing a Vox pop. The Vox pop was male dominated but all of similar age around 16-18 year olds which are the ages of our target audience but they were of different friendship groups and backgrounds so we got a range of different answers which was important for us for discovering an artist to use.

 

 

At this stage, as a group, we hadn’t decided or found an artist or band to use for our music promo, we felt it was important to produce this Vox pop to understand what genre of music our audience of that age listen to. That is why our questions were designed to help us found an artist to please the majority of the audience we asked. We also asked what our audience expects to see in a music promo and about narrative and performance. This was important for us because we could understand what our audience expects to see and we would incorporate this into our music promo to ensure we please our audience because that is our main aim, to keep a specific audience and make our audience increase with our work rather than decrease, this is the same for every other artist and the companies they work with.


 

The Vox Pop for our narrative was important information that we had to get from our audience. This is because from the feedback we could understand our strengths and weaknesses. The benefits of doing this is that we could take this feedback into our main production and ensure we built on our strengths and improved and look at different techniques to counteract our weaknesses from our preliminary. The strengths we obtained from our preliminary was the use of quick editing techniques to help continuity and also the overall feel of the music video looking similar to the actual music video. The improvements we were told were to include more cuts to the beat to help achieve a higher grade and also ensure that some performance i.e. lip syncing is included.

 

 

From our rough edit we felt we could give a preview of our final production at a ‘halfway stage’ of the process of creation. This allowed us to receive positives and negatives at this stage. We could identify our strength from another critics eye and make our strengths stronger but also helped us know where to move forward from our rough edit with the feedback we got and knew how to improve. The strengths we received were the strength of the narrative and strong editing techniques which allowed us to have good cutting to the beat. We felt as a group that this was correct but the narrative still needed tweaking to make it even stronger which we worked on after this feedback. The improvements we received were very helpful for making our final production look polished and professional. As the improvements came from our strengths, our audience felt a little more cutting to the beat and a little tweaking to the narrative would benefits us when trying to achieve a very professional look.

We received feedback from our peers at school for our final production and produced a Vox Pop to show our findings. We set targets of achieving a clear narrative that our audience could understand without any difficulty. We achieved this as our audience all responded positively to our narrative which allowed our promo to be appealing and enjoyable to watch. We also wanted to improve our editing techniques from our preliminary to ensure we created a stronger production to ensure we made our promo look very professional. A main aim of ours was to ensure we did a good amount of cutting to the beat to help this professionalism and we asked our audience for their thoughts on our editing and received positive feedback from the editing which was pleasing as they said the continuity was strong. We were also praised for our narrative and performance which we had to ensure was effective to go with our hard work in the technical areas with the camerawork and editing phase. As for our improvements we got a lot of answers offering very little or no improvements which was a real reward for our hard work to achieve a high grade.

The focus group was very effective to do I feel as we could obtain a wider range of different answers from a range of different people. I feel one major advantage over the Vox Pop that the focus group has is the answers are discussed in a group rather than individually. This allows conversation and ideas to flow between the groups which give us greater depth in answers. As I felt the group would build on each answer giving us a greater idea on how to improve and the positives and the detail of the answers would benefit us to go on and tweak our production.

 

The entire listed above are the ways we obtained audience feedback and they were all beneficial for us when deciding our narrative for our chosen genre. Vox Pop’s allowed us to receive information from a range of different people and different audiences to get a range of answers to help improve our music promo. The focus group was essential as we could get a range of answers for all 3 texts we created and gave us quick feedback on all 3 texts which is a strong way of receiving audience feedback. The strengths of a focus group is that we receive a wide variety of opinions which allows us to take all into consideration, a shortcoming of a focus group I feel is the audience we used were shy and didn’t want to be forward with their answers with other listening around them. This is the opposite to vox pop’s, our audience members gave credible information when carrying out a vox pop as they can voice their own opinion and feel free to elaborate. A negative of a vox pop is that they can get very repetitive and find us not receiving good feedback in the end.

For our final production we used a vox pop and a focus group to obtain feedback. The focus group was effective for us as we could get a range of genders and ages to ask in a group about our production, a focus group is effective as the group of people can argue points between them and allows us to get a greater understand on what really went well and what didn’t. The way we exhibited our production was effective for our audience as we used the new media method of YouTube to exhibit our production and allowed our audience to watch instantly and a way we got views on our production was by using another new media method of social media and sharing on our own personal accounts to get a large number and different range of people to watch and pass on their thoughts about the products. We also contacted our chosen artist to show them our final production as a way of saying thank you but also to receive feedback from the artist themselves.

 

 

This is the image from our chosen artist giving his feedback and all his feedback was positive which really helped as we knew we’d impressed our chosen artist and used his song well to create a narrative. We could take this as inspiration as we did a very good job and impressed a member of the Indie Pop genre.

 

Question 1 - Evaluation

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Influences

We had many influences for our music promo but a big inspiration was the music promo we did for our preliminary task, which was Paradise by Coldplay. We really enjoyed the narrative which we took encouragement from and wanted to use the concept behind there narrative and create our own twist on a similar narrative for our music promo. Our chosen song was called ‘Animals’ and a main lyric which we amplified on was the one line ‘Maybe we’re like animals’ we used this key line as an important idea and wanted to follow a similar narrative of our animal which was a gorilla on a journey like the elephant from Coldplay’s paradise; although we used a businessman in ours to create a link between animals and humans being similar to help create a strong link with the main lyric/line we picked out from our song.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


These are stills from our final music promo and Coldplay’s Paradise and I have placed these next to each other to show the similar shot we tried to reproduce into our music promo. We felt that when we found our chosen track that we felt it was necessary to build on our camerawork and editing skills that we learnt in our preliminary by recreating the Coldplay paradise and using these skills and developing them further for our final production. We used there animal idea as an inspiration and used useful shots they used in ours of similar techniques but we wanted to be unique. The way we did this was by putting our own twist onto our song. We introduced a businessman who had a strong link with the gorilla and our lyrics. This proved that we had worked hard together to come up with a unique idea which looks exciting and different from other Indie Pop music promos. We also used Coldplay paradise as and inspiration because they produced an amplification promo which we wanted to do as a group once we discovered our track and deconstructed the lyrics.

Location

For our music we used many different locations but two main locations and one being Dole Wood and the other being Stamford and many places around Stamford were used. Depending on the genre, the location of a music promo is usually chosen around the type of genre and also is usually chosen depending on the mood and atmosphere of the song/music so it can relate to the music. We took this into consideration when carrying out our research and we listened to our song and the music is slow paced at stages but then fast paced at times so we chose busy town scenery which would reflect the fast paced tempo and the quiet, derelict looking woods which reflect the Dole Wood scenery. When doing our research into our genre we found that the genre of Indie Pop is rather mainstream and is up to date with the latest fashion etc in the world which reveals a sense of normality. The choice of location reflects this as we chose the Stamford town centre as it is a busy place and town centres are mainstream places to get the latest fashion and technologies and as we found these aspects from our research and that also the psychographics of our target audience was mainstreamers we felt this was a suitable location to help represent our genre and attract audience members.

The location also had to be chosen to reflect our narrative and help boost the narrative so it was important we got the locations right. I feel the locations were a success when the narrative is taken into consideration as we designated a specific location for the characters. The location of Stamford town was used to show the gorilla in a unfamiliar place and Dole Wood to show a businessman in a unfamiliar place. Stamford is common for having many enclosed roads with dead ends as well; this is effective for us as we used narrow streets to shoot the gorilla in to create a sense of entrapment and reflect the cruelty of gorillas in real life, creating a deeper meaning. We used Dole Wood for the businessman and his scenes and we chose this for it derelict look and the quietness of it. The quietness was very effective for us as it allowed us to create shots of the businessman looking lost and lonely and helps boost the narrative of two characters trying out/living contrasting lives and the unfamiliar look of it all.

Props

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I spoke about with location about our genre we found that Indie Pop is a rather relaxed and mainstream genre. We found that this is portrayed through locations and props and felt we had to adhere these expectations. The newspaper, for example, is an effective prop for adhering the mainstream look and has created a link to our psychographics. This is because a newspaper is an everyday item which links to our audience and narrative. The location helps link the newspaper as a town is an everyday place used by many people and so is a newspaper.

The costume choice for our music promo was the most effective for us, especially when it came to reinforcing our genre into our music promo. This was because we attempted to make the character look rough with the shirt untucked, top button undone and specs of dirt on the suit. This helped us reinforce our genre as it can reflect the audience members lives. Our target audience are a range of 16-28 year old and those are stressful ages. We found in our research that Indie Pop reflects stressful situations in promos whether it be through the narrative or lyrics. The costume supports this in our promo, the rough and lost look reflects the situation for most Indie Pop lovers, the stressful look and lost facial expressions and the unfamiliar location all support difficult situations audience members will or have gone through but the narrative offers support as the businessman does sort himself out appearance wise and his journey indicates this. This is showing a deeper meaning in our narrative for our audience to link to.