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

Music Video

We have a rough cut of our music video and one of the main criticisms was the clarity of our narrative.This was pointed out to us my classmate viewers as well as teachers, who felt that although we had beautiful, pastoral 'photograph' like shots, they did not contribute to the narrative, rather, they obscured it. So, we needed to find a way to make our narrative more explicit and keep the beautiful nature shots while making them relevant. Below are further other critiques:

Conall's run was also a major issue. As he plays Gaelic football, he has been trained to run in a certain way, and that could be seen in our rough cut. We made him take 'running lessons' from a fellow classmate who told him to take inspiration from the way Tom Cruise runs, his arms are very active, they do most of the work, while the legs simply run normally. I have included the video that we made him watch. Due to this, we needed to refilm almost all of Conall's running scenes, which posed the problem of different weather. Luckily, the weather was mostly compatible with the scenes we needed to film.

 

A further issue that narrative posed was the 'homosexual' element. Some people felt that Conall's relationship with Fintan was left unresolved and that Fintan's appearance was only a plot device. Our teacher felt that an extra scene needed to be added of the two together to cement their relationship and to show that Ophelia was not involved and they were the direct cause of her death. We had intended to add this scene at the beginning to show them enjoying themselves without her while she went insane, but we felt it fitted better as an ending sequence. It showed that Hamlet had tried to save her but couldn't, and now his new life continues, regardless. After making these various changes, feedback improved:

The criticisms we received were ultimately helpful because they aided us in creating a better music video. If they had not pointed out these various flaws, we most likely would never have noticed and changed them for the better. Their feedback have benefited our video incredibly and made it seem more professional.

Digipak

We created our digiapk using Photoshop. It is slightly less organized due to time limitations, so we only had a draft and a final.

INSIDE

BACK

FRONT

This is the feedback we received from our first draft above. In order to get this feedback, we asked people in our age group (our target audience) to give honest feedback for the first and the latter, commenting on the change.

Some people felt that the CD did not look like a CD (with which we now agree) and needed to be re-done. Also, some thought that the colours inside were too much, the images interfered and detracted attention. Our media teacher also felt that the band needed to be present, so we had a photoshoot in school with instruments and the like. Below is the final version:

INSIDE

BACK

FRONT

 This is the feedback we received after we made the changes.

The feedback after we changed the inside was so much more positive. People responded really well to the contrast between the black and white inside and the colorful outside, with several saying they preferred it that way with band, stating "it felt more indie". There was an issue with having the band in the digipak and writing  on the CD. On almost all the indie/alternative CDs and digipaks we viewed, artists were commonly absent to emphasize the importance of the music rather than the personage of the artist. In addition, the writing on the CD detailing producers and the like were often not included for a variety of reasons. Often, the artist, like Gotye, does everything in the production stage himself and therefore does not require this list. Other times the writing is omitted to show that the artist does not want to promote companies or does not want to be associated with corporations. However, sometimes this omission is simply stylistic. 

Advert

 Due to time limitations, our advert was created without a draft, the above image was the first and last version. So, the construction of this was based primarily on first-hand feedback from our teacher while creating it, with us scoping some feedback from our classmates after finishing it. Below are the comments made:

The feedback we received was valuable, but we couldn't say we explicitly made/changed our advert regarding the feedback we received from our target audience. All most all of the feedback we reacted to was that of our media teacher, and those mistakes we changed in the process of finalizing the advert, there were no previous drafts. Nonetheless, thoroughly researching adverts beforehand was certainly useful- it enabled us to make something fairly quickly and accurately that our audience has responded well to.