Bethan Tinker's AS/A2 Media Coursework blog

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
1.As a group (Tom, George and I), we have always been very vocal about our idea of recreating the song 'Crazy' by Gnarls Barkley. It has always been quite a different music videos to everyone else's in our year group, so always got interesting reactions.. mainly, 'are you actually going to through paint at him?' However the vibes were always positive as it is was a unique concept. Our initial treatment was quite detailed, we explained how we were going to use the colours and filters to create the reaction and idea we wanted. However, this unique idea wasn't our original one, so we got a lot of feedback from our 'love story' idea, which didn't seem like a favourite to people, even though it is very similar to other groups, so we were going with the norm. Our treatment video is below, this was after we changed it however. We also had to change the storyboards and casting due to this mixed feedback from our original idea. However due to people being honest I think it helped to create a better product.

As you can, we wanted a deeper meaning to our music video and thats why we chose mental illness. We got really good responses from the teachers as we were using multiple editing skill like filter changes and transition to represent different emotions. We also got a lot of extra technique's we could, like the changing of the colours means different mental health issues from the audience. We also got a lot of credit on the theme mental health for the video, and were able to the inspiration we got. For our original idea a lot of people said it was an intense idea and would take a lot of hard work to make it work, one quote is 'if Jamal is composed enough'. Furthermore, another peer(Guy Pollard) in our class mentioned that romance was possibly to serious for the 'fun loving song'. Furthermore, they expected Soul music to have a more uplifting video and this is where all the different filter changes came in, therefore to keep it visually entertaining. George Robinson claimed that in this video dancing would work very well, as the beat would work very well with pop dance movements. However once again, saying 'if its done well, than it can be good'. Furthermore, we then decided with all this information, to create another video explaining our new plan.
So the changes we had to make was changing the casting of the video, so now we had singularly Jamal for the bulk of the shots that we were going to take. We also had to change the idea of the narrative aspect, so we changed it so different filter changes but also but around Jamal and his acting. We decided to make him lip sync with the lyrics as well. So overall, our first hand feedback from the teacher and peers was very helpful in finding the best idea for our video so was eventually very positive.

2. Our rough cut was very basic, we had only put together a short part of our video together after doing more filming then expected, so we ended up posting this on the 3rd January. You can see our rough cut below, this was the full video however we had no filled all the gaps or placed all the editing techniques in the right place.

As you can see in this video, we had no added the colours to the rough cut yet and therefore we did not have a clear link between the performance and narrative aspects of the video. Instead, all the images has natural lighting at this point. Furthermore, we had to make the lip sync more precise, so that it looks more professional and consistent. This was part of the feedback that I got back however, we got told multiple times that we have to make sure that the different parts of the music video link up - so by using extreme colours we did this. We had already placed the yellow in and this juxtaposed very well with the paint and black and white theme. So basically, a lot of feedback that we got back included the improvement of the editing criteria. But also however, as Sir told us a few times, some specific shots last too long for an ideal music video, so we slimmed down some shots by adding dancing shots of Jamal to break it up. This included in a white and black background. However, we got some positive feedback on how interesting the paint was and how it really interested the audience, looks like we hit the wow factor with those section. Furthermore, we got a lot of positive feedback and comments on Jamal's acting - due to him being so good, the audience were able to interact more easily with the video and felt involved. Also, quoting Mr Wieat wanted to see more of Jamal Dancing.

3. We gathered a lot of feedback through out the process of creating our advert and digi-pack. We talked to many peers within and outside of a class, personally I think we were showing off how proud we were of it! With a lot of designing from me working with Mr Wieat, and tom creating real life pieces out of my drawing made the whole process very interesting. Firstly, we were able to share draft versions of our digi-pack and advert onto the social media page I made; https://www.facebook.com/JamalAsGnarls/?ref=hl

As you can see, we have posted our rough cut for our digi-pack on our Facebook page to gather responses from the public. We reached over 365 people, so gathered some very interesting responses - even though we had put pictures into a six panel design, people seemed to like the 4 panel dici-pack more because it all linked up with similar colours and imagery. We got considerable more amount of likes on this one(four panel). However, we got a lot of help when it came down to editing our dig-pack to be perfect. Over the past few weeks, we got some extra help within class and tips on Facebook. One was if we were to create a effective six panel digi-pack then we would have to incorperate features of colours and patterns to make it look similar to the other panels. Mr Wieat helped us through imagery of putting photo strips and paint splatters all over it.

Furthermore, Mr Milburn helped up with our current idea for our digi-pack, we had to add more songs to make it look more realistic and fill the space. But also add the barcode scanner to make it look a lot more like a proper dici-pack. As a group as well, we always gave each other constructive criticism to benefit each other, during my designs of this we wanted to still see the dance photos of Jamal so that we could incorporate these images to link up to whole video and texts. However, when we added the photo strip panels over it, we couldn't see the image up which we wanted to incorporate along with the colours - With all of our original designs we linked up all our favourite parts, which incorporated his face being on it, the colour with the paints which are seen in the music video and we also include the name of the artist and song. The feedback on these drawings were very positive as they were quite detailed and in colour. The favourite one of our peers was the half face drawing so we worked on building our design for our digi-pack around this whilst making additions.

Furthermore, we had to create a lot of magazine drafts - this was because we weren't sure what type of conventions to include in it. So a lot of research had to be done to see what are the most successful music adverts. We want to make it very clear who was the artist but also however we wanted to keep the image allusive and interesting so therefore people look into the type of music more, and give the brand more attention. As you can see from these posters we wanted to use similar colours whilst making it arty and linking it up to our original video idea (with the paint). We also created a Survey Monkey to find out some more information about what people thought about our video. It came back very positive, we had a few questions which I have shown in a previous post.

We finally came up with a digital example and it was easier to image what we wanted it to look like, Tom Riches and I hadn't worked on the text yet but we had been looking through multiple background colours. Also we wanted his features to stand out as they are very different and appealing, so therefore decided to add colour to his eyes and lips, when we were putting the magazine cover together we actually brung photo with us, and I copied it onto Jamal. We got a lot of good feedback from this picture because it is quite an unusual idea, and partly showed him not being in control. We wanted to people to stare at it for a while whilst I'm enjoying the image. I also put it on Facebook where it got numerous likes and comments which was very positive.

4. Our final version of everything came out at the end of January, after many drafts and multiple opinions we were finally happy with our finished work. As we had done with our mocks, we also did with our final versions, asking peoples opinions through social media and posted and shared our video. A lot of feedback weirdly came from walking round school as they had seen it on our Facebook page, most people said they loved it and enjoyed the different kind of style. We got a lot of positive attention from this, but also this Facebook page helped to create good changes. One boy commented a helpful tip that he thought we should do with the posters, so we ended up changing the posters slightly.

Furthermore, we got very good responses with our final products through our personal questions with peers in our class - I think this really helpful because they had seen our process and growth with our coursework so they knew exactly what was working within the music video and what needed tweaking. Furthermore, by getting Mr. Milburns response was great because it helped with our confidence but he also mentioned his favourite technical elements and we got a professional view of it. Following this, it was good to hear what they thought we could improve as well.