1. As part of my audience research I conducted a series of seven closed questions which included gender, age, favorite genre of music, and how often do you listen to music. After collecting my results into Tally charts and Pie charts, I designed an audience profile based on these findings which helped me to plan my video as it gave me an idea as to what my audience wanted to see. I stuck to these guidelines but still had my own idea in mind. I got some pretty positive feedback from my audience and I also got improvements that my audience want to see.
1.1. Career development
1.1.1. Employee
1.1.2. Employee
1.2. Counseling
1.2.1. Employee
1.2.2. Employee
1.3. Benefits
1.3.1. Employee
1.3.2. Employee
2. Strengths
2.1. The juxtaposition of the cool and warm tones.
2.1.1. My comment wanted to know if this showed a contrast between depression and happiness, to some extent this is true
2.1.2. Pop and Country are both very warm happy shades, the romance is normally very classic and I also wanted to incorporate a theme of Noir which is black and white traditionally. As I tried to incorporate both, there is a strong contrast between the different tones.
2.2. Liked the use of props
2.2.1. The props I used where very subtle including things such as mugs, dolls, item's of clothing and phones. I wanted the props to be nothing out of the ordinary and just normal house hold items. Often I used the props to aid the narrative for instance the ring laying on the sink to indicate a break up and an alarm clock to show the wait.
2.3. The comment stated that they particularly liked the used of the ring laying on the sink as it looked isolated and you could tell that something was wrong. They also enjoyed the scene where Rachel is reading text messages sent from her sister to her boyfriends phone before she through it down, as it created drama.
2.4. The addition of the Barbie dolls to the narrative, and the split narative was intresting.
2.4.1. Originally I aimed to just focused on Rachel's side of the story and have her as the main singer, however whilst editing the video i was thinking of ways to fill in the gaps and I figured might as well include the other women doing the singing as well. This was so I could include cross cuts and it makes it more open to interpretation of whom is after whom's boyfriend. The Barbie dolls aided the narrative as well and copied what the actors where doing they also represented the theme of wanting to be a happy family which the audience seemed to enjoy.
2.4.2. The reason people enjoyed the narrative split is because as the audience put it the two singers seemed to 'bounce of each other' and you could see the two perspectives one more depressing the other a lot more confident. The dolls where considered as being entertaining and once the reason behind them was explained the audience understood what was going on.
3. Improvments
3.1. Include more shots of me and Ethan together
3.1.1. I added extra scenes with me and Ethan including shots of us as a couple the actions fit in well with the song, and I used a lot of my new footage to replace my old less planed out footage.
3.1.2. Ethan although staying hiding has an important role that being to create conflict, originally he only appeared twice but the audience wanted more shots of me and him as it acted as a contrast between Rachel's loneliness and it showed more of the narrative at its potential.
3.1.3. Make some of the overlaid parts slightly clearer so less subtle parts of the narrative were noticed
3.1.3.1. In my draft of the video I had a lot of footage for the video, as the filming was an on-going thing which never really ended until the final edit. As I had made so many changes to the original idea then I constantly needed to add and remove footage, I ended up with a lot of footage that wasn't relevant to the new concept however the footage was still usable so I left it in. This created a problem when I found I had three times as much footage as song length, a lot was overlaid which made the video look unorganised .
3.1.3.2. I had to reorganise the footage and cut a lot of the scenes which lasted two weeks to re edit. Once this was finished I was able to fit my new footage on the video, this was a lot more clearer and with me changing the order of events in the video the narrative was relatively easy to understand.
3.2. Include more scenes with the Barbie dolls
3.2.1. As I previously stated the dolls where tools of the narrative and only used as a transition between other parts of the narrative. However this idea was quite popular with certain audience members.
3.2.2. I had already filmed enough footage with the dolls so I included this in the video. I tried to match up some of the positions of the dolls with the position of the cast, I also included them in a overlay. One particular instance was a scene where Me and Ethan are together and a shot of the doll representing Rachel is in a overlay in the foreground, the doll is wearing a doctors coat and holding a clip board this was supposed to represent that she was at work whilst her husband is with her sister.
4. Strengths
4.1. Interesting use of costumes which seemed to fit in well with the genre and star image.
4.1.1. I focused a lot when it came to costume often aiming for red clothing as I was trying to go for a Femme Fatale look. The use of outfits seemed to compliment the style of the video and people took well to the long red dress that I was wearing on the floor.
4.1.2. The actual comment said that it shows that I have put more thought into what I'm wearing it has the old fashioned look which I was originally aiming for.
4.2. Some off the acting was good as was the lip syncing
4.2.1. It took a while to get the lip syncing to match with the actual song, as although Rachel had the song to mime to, I did it without the aid of music because Ive heard it so much that i knew the way it was sang. However it was challenging to edit without any music playing so i had to sing it myself and then drown out the volume whilst editing. Rachel is a preforming arts student so had some experience with acting, me and Ethan didn't have any, thankfully I do a lot of singing so I'm used to miming styles of songs. To make Ethan feel less camera shy his face remained hiding which also makes his character feel more absent which is how role was meant to be played.
4.2.2. The original comment was very basic and only gave some explanation. Saying that it looked like the characters were singing and you could see what the characters where meant to represent.
5. Improvments
5.1. Include a live performance
5.1.1. The reason I did not include this is because I didn't see it as being relevant to my video. I can however see why people would like to see a live performance as many singers and bands include this. If I had included it it may have fit in with the idea of star image, but it just didn't seem to go with the style.
5.1.2. The audience member made a good connection between the style of the song aka Pop and the typical conventions of a pop music video. I did film some live performance but they did not work well with the video.
6. As I will be re editing my video I will try and include some of the improvements my audience suggested. I will try filming in our media studio for any live shots, and possibly either re film some of the narrative to get my message clear, as a lot of the prop I used to aid the narrative where only on screen for a bit and could have been easily missed. I will make sure everything syncs up, film some extra scenes including shots or me and Ethan and the Barbie dolls, as one of my audience members seemed to really enjoy that.
6.1. Design
6.1.1. Employee
6.1.2. Employee
6.2. R & D
6.2.1. Employee
6.2.2. Employee
6.3. Upgrades
6.3.1. Employee
6.3.2. Employee
6.4. Cost tracking
6.4.1. Employee
6.4.2. Employee