Evaluation - Audience Feedback

To find out what our audience thought of our video, we played it for fellow students and asked them for feedback on what they thought of our video.

In general the feedback that we filmed and the feedback off others was very positive and one of our main strengths was that the video was edited to the beat of the music and that the lip singing was in perfect time with the music.

However, we did receive some useful criticisms that we took into account when finishing the editing. One weakness was that the last shot in the video had been edited to make it brighter, but the audience thought that this did not fit in with the theme that ran throughout the video, Therefore, we restored that part of the clip back to the original colour so that it looked clearer and fit well with the rest of the video. Therefore, receiving feedback was very important and has helped us to improve our video.

Directors Commentary

Our completed music video

Screen shots of our video

1st shot features a split screen long shot (two dancers postioned in the rule of thirds).

2nd shot features a medium longshot of dancers performing their rehearsals.

3rd shot features medium shot of Maria performing( Star Performer).

4th shot features a tilted shot of the song title writen in a diary and maria.

Evaluation

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When creating the CD case and poster we decided to use the same colour, text and picture on both so that they would compliment each other. Firstly, our main colour scheme is a black background with gold text, we have chosen this because on many of Jazmine Sullivan's own merchandise and advertisements she has used two main colours for her colour scheme and the song has a slight Jamaican element to it and black and gold are two colours from the Jamaican flag. Moreover, the flag is also incorporated into the video itself and when using the green screen, we changed the background to black to highlight Maria singing. Therefore, this helps to establish links between our video, CD case and poster.

Secondly, the poster and to some extent the CD case can help to promote the song because it is eye catching, the design fits with our genre of music and they link to the music video itself. However, it can be said that our design is aimed mainly at women due to the style of the font and colours used. But, this has been done purposely as the song is mainly directed at women. Therefore, our target audience is women so we had to produce products that would interest them into purchasing the CD. In addition, the poster is for a magazine advertisement and the majority of readers will be female so we need to focus on what would attract them.

Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

One of our main inspirations for creating a music video which uses both illustration and amplification was to produce a video that was more creative and powerful at portraying the songs message than the original version. In the original video, the main focus is on Jazmine Sullivan singing in a recording studio. But, we wanted to go further than this quite tiresome idea and add a narrative to our version mixed with a performance element. Moreover, even though this artist does not cover the same genre as Jazmine Sullivan, I believe that Michael Jackson is an amazing artist and extremely inspirational to many other artists and very influential to his audience. His music has touched thousands if not millions of people over the many years through the way he has expressed his lyrics. So, we aimed to produce a video where the lyrics are dominant and powerful and the audience can relate to the feelings and emotions expressed by the artist. Just as Michael Jackson had done.

In addition, Missy Elliot is both an artist and producer; we studied some of her work as it is a similar genre to our song and found that dance routines and close up camera shots of the artist are very common in this type of music video. I also researched the R&B/Reggae artist, Sean Paul. In many, if not all of his video’s there is no clear story line and he often uses disjuncture and dance routines too. However, illustration and amplification are not generally found in many R&B/Reggae videos. Therefore, we decided to use a mixture of both an illustration of the songs story line and shots of our star singing and performing a dance routine. By using a mixture of both, we are including the normal conventions of an R&B/Reggae music video and we are being more original by combining it with a storyline to break away from the norm. As a result, we can amplify the songs meaning and make it more interesting and visual for the audience at the same time.

Poster Research

Our poster we have created features the main actress with a close up of her face. we have decided to use a shot of her face because the close up reflects the emotion of the song lyrics, so by us deciding to have this type of shot would definatly target a audience who know about what the song actually means.

What we liked most about the poster would have to bethe black background with gold font. the design layout of the poster worked well with our music video as we decided to stick to a colour scheme. for example the close ups of Marias face often has a brown/ golden glow when we used the lightening effects when edtiting. The gold font makes our poster look bold and classy we decide to go with the gold rather then white, because we wanted to make the poster attract the audience of both RnB & Reggae listeners, it would attract that particular group due to many of their CD /Postercovers having thses colours to distrbute their music.

It definatly fitted our brief because we planned before hand of what we wanted to include upon both the poster and CD cover we didn't make any changes at all so with 100% we stuck to or orginal plan.

We could have improved the poster if we had more choice of images on maria as we could of looked for a better type of camera shot.