Evaluation Q3- What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Music Video

We didn't have a rough cut of our music video as there was an issue with time but we showed a few people at various stages in the process of making it.

One general criticism we were given was for our lack of narrative near the beginning of creating our music video the people we showed wanted to see more of a story within the fast edits. Another criticism was the fact that there was not enough space between each of the clips of the protagonist, Jade, spinning round.

Here is a video from a few months ago of our music video unfinished:

As you can see from the video, the second criticism was right, the clips of Jade spinning were far too close together. The background and the dark image of Jade contrast so much with the other, slightly more colourful clips that it is very obvious to an audience just how close together the clips are. To resolve this we filmed more, so we were able to include more clips in between each spinning clip. 

Another criticism we got near the beginning of creating our music video was that the video overall was too colourful and therefore cheerful to be linked to the music underneath it. Contradictions can work really well, especially in Indie music but there was too much contrast between the song and the video. We decided we preferred the video in an almost monochrome effect, apart from certain images that we wanted to stand out. So we applied the video effect Bleach Bypass on iMovie to almost all of our clips. This made the video seem really edgy and made the clips that we wanted to, stand out.

The criticisms we received really helped us in creating an overall better music video. If they hadn't have been pointed out to us we probably would never had noticed. The criticism's benefited our video incredibly and made it seem more professional. 

Digipak

We created our digipak on Photoshop.

Our digipak was slightly more organised than our music video and so we had time to make a series of rough drafts and ask a group of people, varying in age, to tell us what they thought of each draft. 

Here is the breakdown of our final few drafts:

ONE

TWO

THREE

and finally FOUR

As you can see, there is a clear thought process in the deciding of our album cover.

The people we talked to said that number ONE was too dark to be an album cover and that it looked more like a promotion for a horror film.

They said they preferred TWO to ONE but that it was too detailed to be an album cover for The xx. They told us we should either have a crystal effect or an eye, but not both together.

That led us to number THREE, everyone we asked said that this was the best one, as it was both simple and detailed at the same time. The one thing they did mention was that it didn't look like a CD as it was rectangular and didn't have a margin down the side as is conventional to CD cases.

Number FOUR was our completed album cover, it includes everything that our audience feedback required.

Audience feedback was especially beneficial in the creation for our album cover as this is the task where we were getting familiar with Photoshop and didn't understand the little things we could do to change our product. The audience feedback pushed us to find out these things and helped us to create an even better digipak magazine advertisement. 

Digipak Advertisement

The digipak advertisement was done very late on in the A2 media process due to a misunderstanding of our brief. This meant that we had to create our digipak predominantly through research and the opinions of our media teachers. We researched both digipak advertisements of well-known artists and also those of previous A2 media students, we also briefly looked at the past students' audience feedback to see if any of the comments could apply to ours.

The main points made on previous students' digipak adverts were:

• There should be an association with or a picture of the album cover
• It should be clear when the album is coming out
• The main songs from the album should be shown as a way to pull an audience in

We applied all of these aspects to our magazine advert.

Although researching previous A2 media products was a good idea and very useful finding general feedback, a more personal audience feedback based on how our advert looked as well as what it contained would have been far more valuable.