Thursday, 31 March 2011

Showcase Evaluation

Yesterday, our teacher arranged for our class to showcase our music videos so far, to each other and some extra peers who happened to have a free period at the time. During period two we compressed and transferred our video so that our teacher could access it on her computer. Most of our class conversely, didn't manage to do this in time for period three, so our showcase began about half an hour late, causing it to run into our lunch hour. This didn't affect the quality of our discussions and evaluations though.


Although our teacher had been keeping an eye on the progression of our music video throughout the editing process, this was an opportunity for her to summarise her opinions and advice for us. Her comments, in her exact words, were:


- Love the baseball reaction
- Not sure about "fight"
- The syncing was mostly perfect
- Matches the style
- It's INTERESTING - you keep the variety going
- Seems that the style matches Taylor Swift
- Performance is really good and convincing
- Lighting on the dart board is perfect!
- The spinning looks like perfect space
- Did people get your narrative?
- Emma does evil/disgust well.. !
- Like the red lighting when singing into the camera


It was good listening to other people's reactions to parts of our video, that hadn't been watching the progression in composing it. This gave us an insight into how our targeted audience would perceive it, which we no longer have ourselves. Personally, I had been worried that outsiders wouldn't be able to follow the narrative, perhaps at all, due to the heavy number of locations featured throughout. The showcase fotunately, disproved this as everybody followed it "easily" and knew exactly what the narrative was.


The evaluation sheets involved completing a bipolar chart to begin:












Followed by the questions:
-What was especially GOOD about the music video?
- Would you watch this again? If yes, why? If no, why not? and,
- Did you notice any serious issues such as continuity errors, strange edits, did anything not make sense to you?


The bipolar results convey that generally our audience enjoyed each aspect of our music video, though perhaps we need to fine-tune our synchronising and camerawork a little.


Having read through the other questions on my own, the main aspects that people liked, involved:
- The lighting
- The performance itself
- The close-ups
- The mixture of performance and narrative
- The pace - "doesn't get boring"
- Funny at some points
- Believable miming and acting
- Strong narrative
- Story made sense
- Very much like a real music video
- The ending - lights out
- "Fantabulous" edits and effects!
- Seemed professional
- Variety in costume


Every person that took the time to evaluate said they'd like/love to watch our music video again. The recurring reason was that it's "entertaining"/"interesting".


There was some constructive criticism, which is arguably more helpful than anything else. Here are all of the issues from our pilot audience's perspectives: 
- Some parts were out of sync
- "A form of revenge would be nice to see"
- "Didn't really get the fight"
- Amy laughs when I push her face in the dirt
- Brief black flashes
- Emma's face is a bit too comical at times!
- "wuh-ooh" - cut a bit shorter?
- Emma coming out of the car is odd
- Use more effects

A lot of this comes from our video still being incomplete. (Every other group's incomplete too, not just ours.) Some parts being out of sync, the black flashes and lacking a bit in effects is down to this.

HOWEVER,

The fight scene seems to have been highlighted as being too friendly and not fitting in with the video. A few people also stated that Amy laughs whilst I'm pushing her face into the dirt. I know Amy really well, so I know that when she's scared, she does look like she's laughing. Our audience of course don't know her, so it looks like we will have to refilm this part. Whether we scrap the original material completely or just add in another camera angle on the laughing part to cover it up - we'll have to see.

The "wuh-ooh" being too long with the suggestion of 'cutting it shorter' can't really be done as that would involve making actual changes to the audio track itself which wouldn't be right. We've taken this onboard though and might try to involve another camera angle to give the illusion of cutting down the length of this part.

"Emma coming out of the car is odd" we don't agree with. Every consumer is different, so although we don't agree with this opinion we have respected it and taken it into consideration, but seeing as only one person has said this, we're going to put the thought to one side.



OVERALL,

We've found that showcasing our work has not only reassured us that our video is of good quality, it has also highlighted aspects that could potentially be issues that we had overlooked. Being able to watch and reflect off of other groups' videos also helped for us to compare and contrast and feel more comfortable with our video.
"Emma's face is a bit too comical at times!". There is one part I could understand that my face looks comical, but it does still fit in with the overall video and genre. Also, multiple people complimented the fact that there are funny parts throughout the video, so we plan to keep it.

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