What have you learned from your audience feedback? Question 3 What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the creation of our music video we have sought audience feedbacks on two different occasions; the first was when we screened our animatic storyboard concept. Allowing audiences to see a very rough outline of how our video would be presented and how it would eventually be structured. The second was when we screened the rough cut of our final music video – this showed a much more evolved and structured version of our music video in its close-to-finished state. Feedback from this screening would have allowed us to edit any small errors or inconsistencies with our music video that may have slipped by when editing, it would also allow us to realise the strengths of our video, the best parts and how – for what remaining editing time we had – we could implement these techniques in other elements of the video.

We would have preferred to have positive reviews of our work, however me were mainly looking for valued, constructed criticism that we could eventually correlate to our work and make amends to going forward. If there were any inconsistencies or errors with our narrative, or any faults with the editing of either the animatic or the rough cut music video. We received a wide array of both positive and negative feedback, both constructed criticism and some not quite so helpful. We were, however, able to ultimately make improvements towards the final product.

For our animatic we obtained a lot of useful feedback For our animatic we obtained a lot of useful feedback. Our first question asked what the reviewers enjoyed about our storyboards, and the main positive feature was the camera shots, and also the forest environment we used. Some of the feedback implied that our animatic did seem to thematically match with the type of music we were trying to represent; Indie/Pop. In contrast, when asked what the least favourite part of the storyboard was, the main and most repetitive criticism was that the narrative was hard to follow and ultimately quite confusing especially the scenes that took place in or around the college, these scenes were especially described as being hard to follow. The shots did seem to flow together nicely however they did not take away from the difficulty to follow the narrative. When asked to give a score between one and ten, the average response to this was a seven out of ten and when asked to review the quality of the images every reviewer scored the images as ‘good’. Overall the results of our questionnaire were useful and constructive.

After a few months of shooting our video, we prepared a draft of our final video to be shown to a separate group. Another Questionnaire was produced to review this piece of work. When asked to identify the most successful aspects of our video, the main response was that the shots flowed together well and showed good continuity, as well as the camera angles also having a positive influence in the quality of the shots. The scenes set in the forest seemed to be given the highest praise. We asked if the singing in the video seemed realistic and we received a few replies that lip syncing was off in some places, and that the singers seemed to lack a degree of emotion and willingness. We tried to put the reviewers in our position and have them suggest any improvements to the work, or things that they would have done differently, the more constructive critiques we received was that the editing had some errors that could be ironed out, as well as some of the environments could have been changed to better suit the narrative.

Our Animatic can be found here. Our Draft Video can be found here. For our Animatic it was easy to make some heavy adjustments to our narrative plot and the overall structure of the video, however by the final stages of our video editing – by the time of our questionnaire – it was very difficult to make any major adjustments to the video. It would have been exceptionally difficult, in addition, to completely alter any locations or lighting or any other on-location issue with the locations, actors or effects. We could, however, alter some of the inconsistencies with the editing of the video and we hoped that the changes we made would ultimately improve upon the final product. Our Animatic can be found here. Our Draft Video can be found here.

There were some suggestions, however, that we did choose to ignore There were some suggestions, however, that we did choose to ignore. While all criticism was appreciated and anticipated some of the suggestions were impossible to adjust or lacked some credibility. One response, for example, suggested that the bedroom shown in the video looked too neat and tidy, and that there were too many objects in there. Not only was this difficult for us to alter due to most of the recording being finished, and the location used difficult to access, but we also failed to find many reasons why this could have a detrimental effect on the final video.