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.

Video Editing

Due to the late start in our filming, we won't have time to make a rough cut of our video with iMovie and then make our final video on Final Cut Express so we're using iMovie to produce our final video. We filmed each setting around 3 or 4 times to get different shots, for example when we filmed the bedroom scenes, we did a close up and a mid shot of her lying on the bed and a close up of her sat on the bed. This meant that when it came to editing, we had a lot of footage to choose from! As we could hear the music in the background of our filming, it made it easier for us to put together. We started from the beginning of the song and worked our way to the end, combing performance and narrative shots throughout. We'd select quite a long piece of footage and then once we'd put it onto the storyline we'd cut it shorter to make it consistent with the previous shot. Once we'd put a sequence together to fit the whole song, we applied the actual song to the storyline and blocked the audio from the original shots. Because we put the music on last, it meant we had to crop some parts of the video to sync with the lyrics. The last thing we did was add a tagline to the beginning and end of the video which gave information about the name of the song and the artist.

Filming Day 3

For our final day of filming, we used the school canteen in John Cabot to film our last narrative scene of the music video. We went in between break and lunch time so it was relatively quiet and filmed Emma sat near the window, at a table by herself. Then we filmed Susan (who was also filmed in the garden scene at Emma's house) coming through the door and walking straight past her. We filmed this part from many different angles for example, an over the shoulder shot of Emma so we could see Susan walking towards her, a close up of Emma to see her expression as Susan walks past and a two shot of both of them to give the audience a clear idea about what's going on. Filming in here was quite difficult as the canteen is surrounded by windows, and as our filming day was sunny, it meant we had to position the characters and camera in a place where we could have good lighting without any shadows or making them seem too brightly lit.

Filming Day 2

We managed to film most of our scenes on Tuesday, but needed to add an extra performance shot. We have a drama studio in BBA which is used for several performances, and has staging blocks with a lighting system so we thought this would be a perfect setting for a performance shot. The curtains in the studio are black which were useful as we were able to create a plain background, making sure that the main emphasis would be on Emma. We used some stage blocks, at first just using one level but then moving one on top of the other so she was more central to our shots. We chose different angles to shoot from, one low angled shot to make her look more powerful as she was singing and the attention would all be on her, we used a close up of her face as she was singing and another shot where she was stood in the middle of the camera and you could see the whole of her body. We filmed each of these shots twice as we didn't know what lighting would look best on the screen. We filmed once using a spotlight which focussed on Emma, and another one with just some background lights so she was visible but not as blatant.

Filming Day 1

We chose to start shooting on a Tuesday as all three of us in our group have a media lesson in the morning and are free for the rest of the day, as well as this our friend Emma who we'd asked to be in our video was free too meaning that we had a whole day to film. We were really lucky to choose this day as it was really sunny outside which worked well for the style of our song but also provided good lighting for us and enabled us to easily work outside.

We started off by choosing an outfit for each scene we were going to film, picking mainly casual clothes for the majority of the scenes and a more dressy outfit for just one of the performance shots. We felt that this reflected our target audience as they are quite a young age and would tend dress in more casual clothes than the outfits that are mainly seen in similar music videos.

We started off in the morning by filming all the shots we need indoors, for example, in the bedroom mirror and on the bed. then around midday when it was slightly warmer, we filmed our outdoor shots like where the two girls are sat on the bench and when the main character was sat on the wall outside. We had to move the camera into different positions to make sure we had a good amount of lighting but without having shadows over Emma's face as it would affect the quality of our filming. We mainly filmed our shots using the whole song, but there were a few shots where we just filmed random parts without music so we could use them between different performance shots throughout the video.

We were quite lucky when filming outside as the street which Emma's house is on was relatively quiet, especially seeing as we chose to film during the day when most people are at work or school.

Ancillary Task - Poster

We also had to produce a poster for the album release of our artist. I decided to keep the colour scheme the same as the rest of my digipak because it gives a sense of familiarity. A lot of the promo posters I looked at used the same colours and pictures too, and some just used a bigger version of the picture used on the album front cover. I used a font which is similar to the font used by the famous music magazine, Rolling Stone as its a very recognisable type of writing that people associate with music. Its also very bold which draws attention.

Ancillary Task - CD Digipak

Part of our task was to produce a CD front cover, back cover and two CD inserts for our artist. To start with, I used Photoshop as it was already installed onto the computers in my media class. However, as I'd never used it before I found it very difficult to produce good quality work on it and decided to use Paint Shop Pro instead. Although I needed some help to work out how to use certain tools, I found it much easier to use than Photoshop. After we'd filmed the performance scenes in the drama studio on our second day of filming, we decided to take some photos that we could use for our ancillary task. I chose the photos I liked the best and using the edge seeker selection tool on Paint shop pro, I cut Emma out from the backgrounds which would make it easier to produce new images. I used the same font colours throughout all of the pictures included in my digipak, and made all of my backgrounds black. I decided to use some vintage style brushes to use in the background of my front cover as it made it look less plain without making it take the attention away from the picture of Emma. I used a similar background for the CD inserts to keep consistency throughout my digipak. On the back cover, I didn't want to keep a plain background because it looked quite boring but I didn't want to use the vintage brushes again as I thought it would be too repetitive. So I decided to use a gradient for my background to give it more texture. It still looked quite plain when I finished so I added a vintage brush to match the theme. My front cover, insert and back cover can all be seen below.

Front Cover


Thank You Insert


Lyrics Insert



Back Cover