Video Feedback

On Wednesday, we all had to show our music video to the two media teachers and the rest of our class to get feedback on what we've done well and what we can improve. We generally got good feedback, even though we've still not finished the actual video yet! We have a good mix of narrative and performance shots, but we need to work on syncing every part of the video to the music. One of the teachers commented on our theme of our video and about the characters we used. We decided to focus the video on friendship issues rather than relationship issues which is quite often found in videos of similar genre, as seen in the screen shots below.

Rihanna








Pixie Lott



Katy Perry


However, she thought that our video showed a good example of traditional representation as you could interpret the video as being about a same sex relationship.


We were told that we had a really good balance of narrative and performance shots that complemented each other well. We also got good feedback on the narrative scenes as the story fitted really well to our target audience, and also flowed well. However, the lighting on the main performance scenes (where Emma is on stage) were criticised because of the quality of the shots. The lighting was very bright but the picture ended up being quite fuzzy and blurry. Filming in this setting was quite difficult as we were only able to see Emma clearly if the lighting was very bright, which resulted in the poor quality afterwards. Susan decided to upload our video onto YouTube and then onto Facebook, a social networking site that we both regularly use, to get feedback from a wide range of people both who we know and don't know. This picture is a screenshot of the post and the comments we recieved.



One person commented on the miming of the music, Emma didn't actually sing the song for all of our filming, sometimes she just mimed which could explain why it doesn't look as good as it could. This is definitely something that should be considered if we were to refilm some scenes.

Mr Rees, our media teacher, said that some of our shots were a bit still and said we should look at the Ken Burns tool on iMovie. This allowed us to select a certain area of a shot and zoom out in the direction we chose, which made it look like we had used more panning shots throughout filming.


Our Questionnaire
To get even more feedback on our video, we decided to create a questionnaire to give to other students between the ages of 16 and 19.

How would you rate our music video out of 10?
1 - 0
2 - 0
3 - 0
4 - 0
5 - 4
6 - 5
7 - 11
8 - 2
9 - 3
10 - 0

How would you rate the performance out of 10?
1 - 0
2 - 0
3 - 0
4 - 0
5 - 0
6 - 7
7 - 8
8 - 9
9 - 1
10 - 0

How would you rate the narrative out of 10?
1 - 0
2 - 0
3 - 0
4 - 0
5 - 3
6 - 9
7 - 12
8 - 1
9 - 0
10 - 0

Does the narrative create an easy to follow story?
Yes - 19
No - 5
Don't know - 1

Does our video look like a pop video?
Yes - 22
No - 3

Have we used a variety of different shot types?
Yes - 18
No - 7

The results show that all students rated our video with a score higher than 5, with the majority of people rating it as a 7. I think this shows that overall, our video is of good quality but still has room for improvements.
Our performance scenes rated higher on average than the narrative scenes, I think this is because we only had a very few scenes where only narrative was used, making it harder to distinguish between the two. Most people thought our storyline was easy to follow, which I agree with as we made it quite basic and light hearted. 22 out of 25 people thought our video looked like a pop video which is very good as that's what we had intended it to look like! The main things I think we could improve on would be using more shot types and making our narrative scenes more interesting.

Performance vs Narrative

As mentioned in my previous post, Jamie T separates narrative and performance shots in his video for If You Got The Money. To show this, I decided to screenshot every shot that is shown in the first 40 seconds of the music video and put them onto Power Point. I placed each shot onto a different slide, and made two different presentations, one showing the original order of shots as seen in the video, and the other separating the performance shots from narrative shots.

Original Order of Shots

Jamie t – if you got the money original shots

View more presentations from stacypringle.

These are the shots in the order they would've been filmed in.

Jamie t if you got the money ordered shots

View more presentations from stacypringle.

Jamie T - If You Got The Money

Jamie T fits into the indie/alternative genre which also includes bands like The Maccabees and Bombay Bicycle Club. I decided to look at his music video to see how it differs from the other videos I've looked at from the pop genre and found that there was a split between performance and narrative shots. In the Katy Perry and Kesha videos I looked at, the narrative shots were combined with performance so this If You Got The Money was very different. Jamie T's video is fairly simple, using only three settings for the narrative shots and one for the performance shots. The video uses quite a few close ups that are slowed down as the song first starts which not only fits in with the slower paced start to the song, but also introduces the different characters of the video to the audience. Most of the narrative shots throughout the video are close ups or mid shots, they show different guys dancing badly which uses mid shots, whilst the girls' reactions are shown by using close ups. All of the shots have been put into slow motion whilst the performance shots aren't in slow motion, making them appear much more faster. Close ups are used again for the performance shots, but more extreme close ups are used especially for musical objects like the microphone, symbals and guitar. The lighting is a lot darker than the other videos I looked at, both the narrative and performance shots have been filmed in a club, with narrative on the dark dancefloor and the performance on the stage which uses red lighting.