Evaluation - Question 3 Plan

What have you learned from your audience feedback?


In answering this question, I intend to host a 'premiere' of our music video to members of our target audience, and issue a questionnaire to obtain further specific feedback, and add that to the comments already received.
The first pieces of feedback were taken following our pitch to our peers. They liked the name of our band -Perplexa - as they felt it was important to our target audience; 'to perplex' means 'to confuse', so when the target audience was late teens/early 20's, the name Perplexa highlights the confusion of the teenagers in the world, tying in with political matters and the idea that it is hard being a teenager - this was received well with our pitchees. They also approved of our challenging of the convention of flashbacks in our video. As normally flashbacks involve a darker, more abstract effect being applied to them through editing, the idea of changing this in our video to a brighter, lighter effect was met with positive feedback.
My teacher also liked the inspiration we had selected, such as Devlin's 'Community Outcast (for its simplicity, which we particularly tried to emulate) and Eminem's 'Not Afraid' (for the conveyance of its message)
After submitting our draft music video, the feedback received was positive, yet there was much to be improved on. Our teacher advised us to change a number of things, the majority of which we agreed would make a more effective, realistic music video.
We were advised to introduce the artists sooner in the video - an important factor considering this was our band's first single - in order for the audience to identify with them as early as possible.
Our teacher's main criticism was that the narrative of the draft didn't convey our targeted  theme of loneliness effectively enough. To address this, we changed our video to predominantly performance. Instead of the narrative being the main body of our video, it became supporting subplots in order to help display the theme. We felt this worked well, as it minimised the need for a secure narrative, and shifted the focus on the performance of our artists, which our teachers said was very good (especially the rapper). In doing this it made our video less of a story, and more of a music video - which is, after all, the task we needed to execute.
We were also advised to include more footage of the rappers performance, as our teacher said this was the best part of the video. He commented the the montage idea which took up some of the rapper's verse was good, but shouldn't be used at the expense of him. To address this, we moved the montage to later in the video, thus minimising the space it took up on the video, and added more footage of the rapper, this time using a new location. Performance using multiple locations is something used in many music videos, and so us making this change also made our music video much more suited to being a music video.
The new locations used in our final video were also much more bleak than the ones used previously (which our teacher commented were a bit too 'leafy'). The increased bleakness helped convey the mood of our video more effectively, as it meant much more of the city was seen, and the negative feel of it was emphasised.
Another piece of advice given was to use more close-ups to show more emotion in our characters' and artists' faces. We acted on this by adding more of them to the second half of the video.
Our teacher said that the flashbacks in the draft music video ruined the tone of the video as they were too jovial and happy. We addressed this by replacing the flashback with more of the rapper. This in a way 'killed two birds with one stone'; more of the rapper was included, and the negative tone was maintained by losing the happy parts.
The influence of the exam board also affected a large part of our production. Our teacher advised us not to include the homeless man in our video, on the basis that the exam board sees so many videos featuring the homeless and they see it as an unoriginal idea. Therefore, we removed it from our final cut.