Evaluation - Feedback

What have you learned from your audience feedback?


The use of Web 2.0 has been very benificial to gain our feedback.
As well as asking people questionnaire's and thier opinions, we posted our video on youtube and created a group for our video on facebook.
We didnt get detailed comments on these however so we created a google document so it allowed people to write more detailed answers that we were trying to recieve.

The majority of comments were positive, however the comments to improve were very similiar so it was very easy to see what we needed to improve on.
"it was jumpy and the animation could have worked better with the beat of the song"
The first time we used final cut express we just edited in our footage and sync'd the music with it, so when we first asked for feedback from the people in our class it was only from one scene and didnt have no narrative scenes in.

A few people said that some of the shots lasted too long, so we chopped and changed our video to make the shots shorter and faster, however from some of the comments from our final video we can see that we may have gone too fast with some scenes as people called the video "jumpy".
As we had no other scenes it was quite a boring video at that time with no narrative so people commented on that, but due to it being our first attempt at using final cut express that was expected.
When looking at the comparison video from the feedback "Incomplete Lullaby" people stated that the lights on the black background looked good and made it look more professional. From the comments we both wanted to recreate the lights on the background, however we found it too difficult to try and do on final cut express so we just left it as it was.
While recieving comments from our class mates throughout the process of making the video i think we improved alot of what they were saying needed looking at. We included much more narrative scenes, also while including outside scenes to make the video look more colourful.

I believe if we didnt have these feedback comments i think we would have left it with just the black scenes, it wasnt untill we had another persons perspective on the video that we noticed how bland the video was looking.

Due to posting the video on facebook and youtube, i think we recieved alot of useful feedback that we couldnt have gathered together just through word of mouth.
I think alot of people also liked to comment on our video on the Google Document due to that fact that it was anomonous so people could be thierselves and really tell us the honest opinion they had.

I think if we had more time to improve our video we would have sorted out the animation to make it fit in with the beat more, as alot of peoples comments were about that.
Also we would have changed the scenes so they didnt seem jumpy and to make some of the shots last longer, so they seemed smoother.

Evaluation - Technologies.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The devolpment of web 2.0 has allowed us to easily find resources into researching and planning our video, and ancillary task's.

Research and planning:
During the research and planning stages we used mainly youtube to research other examples of the genre of video and to also see what other students doing a level media had produced.
We got alot of inspiration from different video's for example an AS video recreating the same song we have made, The professional video to our song and some songs that were in the same genre of this song, Incomplete Lullaby was our inspriation for our stop motion and Neopolitan Dreams was our inspiration for the outside scenes.
We also used Google, to look at examples of CD booklets, and posters. Also we had already looked at some from our own collection of CD's, the variety on Google was much more accessible to find.






Construction:
While making our music video, CD cover and poster we used quite alot of technology that has only recently been created.
To record our footage we used many different camera's, we used a video camera, a still camera and a camera phone. Before this project i had never used a video camera within a project for school, so i had never learnt the full details into creating a good movie. However throughout the year i learnt how to connect it to a tri-pod, how to use a dolly with the video camera and which angles work well, as before i would simply point the video camera at my subject and press record. I now feel very confident that i could create great clips on a video camera.
The still camera i had previously used in the last years coursework when creating my music magazine. I used the still camera to get the poster and CD booklet pictures for, and also to create the animation.
The mobile phone camera was used to take location shots due to not having a camera on us at the time. However the mobile phone also acted as our music when we didnt have a louder speaker around us to record our video.

Once we had all our video footage we began to edit it.
To begin with we started to upload and edit our footage on imovie as it was simple and we both had some knowledge how to use it. However when we wanted to do more detailed editing we learnt about final cut express. Final cut express allowed us to cut and edit our footage in sync with our music so it looked more professional and was more easier for us to edit in. Before we hadnt used final cut express so it was brand new to us, we made a few mistakes at the beginning by un-sync'ing parts and by cutting in the wrong place, but once we had sorted out our mistakes we learnt from them and it became easy. Untill the end we experiences problems with the programme, for example the clips needed rendering all the time and it regualary came out of sync but we managed to sort it all out in time.

Due to all our of animation pieces being hundrends of photos we couldnt just upload it on imovie so we had to upload it first on iphoto. As i dont own a mac, and are not used to them, i had never used this programmes before but it were easy to pick up and we had no problems with it. Due to mac's being quite new still they are not as well known yet- people still could have never seen a mac and still use a normal PC. However they are being more popular as are the programmes, iphoto and imovie.
To create our CD booklet and poster, we mainly used photoshop. I am very familiar with this software due to using it alot last year and from previous outside experience. So this wasnt too difficult for me to do and i mananged to do it quite quickly.

An example of editing a photo we took on a still camera through Photoshop.

Evaluation:
To gather feedback from our video, we used all the technology avaiable to us teenagers, i uploaded it onto youtube, and then from youtube i linked it to facebook, this way letting my friends see it. However people weren't commenting so i created a facebook page just the video and created 'polls' for my friends to answer once they had watched the video. It worked quite well i got a few responses, however they lacked detail so i created a google document, and wrote questions which would make people write more detail into there answers.
I shared my google document link by facebook, email, text messages and through word of mouth. This worked very well and i have now recieved lots of detailed feedback that will help me.

While creating my Video, CD Cover and Poster i wrote down all the stages of my work and displayed them on blogger, this is a easy website which allows you to add new posts and write down all the information, add photo's, embedd video's and link websites on. Its really easy to use and displays the information in a professional, simple way.