Advanced Portfolio Critical Evaluation

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

During the development of our music video, it was essential that we gathered audience feedback so that we could easily ascertain the strengths and areas for improvement within our work. Therefore to ensure that our music was of a professional standard we asked some of our peers to view and evaluate our music video. From the feedback we attained, our peers informed us that the lip-synching and framing of shots in the video was excellent however they recommended that there should be a larger variety in shots in order to increase the pace of the music video.  An example of the audience feedback is provided below:

This feedback allowed us to make amendments to the music video to satisfy our audiences’ needs. We incorporated additional shots of the band and lead singer into the music video to create more variation and reduced several shots down to 2-3 seconds in length. We found that these alterations were effective at establishing an appropriate music video for the genre and maintaining an interest for the audience. The audience feedback was very helpful to us and allowed to us to make very critical changes to the work we had produced.

How has online media technology enabled you to distribute your project to a wide audience?

Having access to the World Wide Web was an effective way in distributing our work. We established a blog which allowed us to constantly update the progress on out music video, website and CD cover. We were able to keep a wide audience involved by including polls and interactive media such as images and video files within the blog.

By George

Evaluation - Steph Sverdloff

Q2. How effective is the combination of your media product and ancillary text?

Throughout the task’s we have maintained a clear image of the band – showing the band as whole rather than individuals which is a generic convention of an indie band.  We also kept a clear consistent theme for all three tasks (video, digipack and webpage) which we chose as nature. This occurred from the song title we chose for our video – ‘Party in a Forest (where’s Laura?)’ – And also the band’s name is a wild animal so we thought this would fit with the band very well.  By choosing this as a theme we were able to pick a location for the shoot and use the same location for the band photo shoot.

All three products are made for the same purpose of promoting the band by showing our target audience of late teens to early twenty year olds, who the band are and what type of music they produce.  They are all interrelated by our theme and the band themselves. Despite having line-up changes after the photo shoot and before the filming of the video, it is clear that the band is a three piece – as we show three male members on the digipack, the webpage and the video. Also the band is recognisable as an indie band due to the clothing they were – jeans and casual t-shirts – therefore fitting in with the generic conventions.

I personally feel they do target the audience as the images and narrative we created through the video is stereotypical enjoyed by our target audience.  As well as this the overall theme for all three products helps to keep everything consistent and easy for the audience to identify who the band is and what they represent.

Q4. (Part 2)

How did you use technology to research and plan? How have you used technology (e.g. YouTube) to gather audience feedback?

For our technology research we used a range of social networking sites – MySpace and Facebook -  and official band websites for the band themselves – The Wombats – and other similar artists. Another part of the internet we used to help plan and work out our production was YouTube. We used this to look at previous work by the band and found a consistent comedy element which we decided to add into our video. We gained audience feedback by showing groups of people our video during the construction period, we used iMovie for this.

Lorna's Evaluation

1) Our music video for the song “Party in a Forest (Where’s Laura?)” by The Wombats fits under the “indie rock” genre. We wanted to stick to typical conventions such as; having the band in casual dress, a lot of performance-based shots, and the common use of narrative.

We filmed a lot of shots of the band, including that of performance and a variety of shots of the lead singer in our boy-meets girl narrative. These shots help to promote the band’s identity, particularly that of the lead singer, who with most bands is the ‘frontrunner’ and therefore most recognisable.

In this post modern age it is difficult to accent individual appeal, and although we followed the typical convention of using a “boy meets girl” narrative we decided to create a whimsical twist where it is revealed that the boy and girl are in fact wombats (making a playful reference towards the band’s name).

We wanted this narrative to form a light-hearted point of interest towards the band’s representation and break the cliché of typical boy meets girl storylines. We thought this narrative would make an appropriate appeal towards our target audience of young people aged around 12-25years, as they would best appreciate this form of subtle humour. However, we found it difficult to hint towards the wombat twist throughout the video so we are unsure if this was conveyed fully to our wider audience.

4a) To edit our video we used IMovie software on the Apple Macintosh computers, which we had previous experience with from our AS module. IMovie was easy to operate and really drove our creativity, although we were discouraged slightly when the Macs kept crashing, which commonly resulted in data loss. Our website was created using IWeb, which we found doesn’t provide extensive design templates, so we were limited to a fairly basic design. However we are proud of our final website and conducting relevant market research and learning to use the software was a very beneficial experience. We also used Photoshop software which really drove our creativity as it has a multitude of uses and it enabled us to create image compositions and experiment with logo designs.

By Lorna.

Final Website Design

Our final website, ta-dah!

Steph, George and Lorna.

Final Music Video

The completed music video filmed and edited by George Palmer, Lorna Spencer and Stephanie Sverdloff of LSG Records.

The final final CD Cover

We tweaked the back cover - with the track listing -  by taking away less 'fog' and adding a bonus track which we found is a common element in single c.d. covers.

It is now finally done.

Steph, Lorna and George