Task 12: Audience Feedback

" Audience feedback on how successful your film and print products are compared to real products in terms of codes and conventions."

Initial Audience Feedback From My Coursework Pitch and Final Proposal:
(From my media studies class)

• The idea of having a positive message by including a real helpline in the video was well received.
• The fact that the female character acts as a "guardian angel figure" was also well-received, but concerns as to how I would ensure this idea was presented in a clear and easily understandable way in the video.
• Some issues of a lack of clarity in some panels of my storyboard were also highlighted.

This feedback led to me including some footage of tarot cards, with the hope that the meanings of the cards would clarify the narrative of the video, as well as giving me more footage to replace any shots which I decide to reject in the post-production process.

The concerns over how to present the female character in my video as a personification of the support provided by the helpline and as a guardian angel figure led to my decision to place a sketch of angel wings faintly over some shots of the female character in the music video.

Audience Feedback on the First Edit of the Music Video:

(Mostly from my peer Jacob Campbell-John)

• The footage should be cropped by 12% on the top and by 12% on the bottom to create a widescreen effect on video.
• Using the effect "fast colour corrector" should be used to improve the quality of the footage used in your video. Try adjusting the brightness and increasing the saturation of individual shots until the desired effect and quality is reached.

Audience Feedback on Initial Digipak Designs:

• "The island design looks better, It's easier to look at."
• "I prefer the one with the island on it, it's a lot more simplistic and I hate it when album artwork is over-complicated."
• "The design with the collection of pictures is nice, but it might be too complex for the front of a CD cover. Wouldn't it be better to have pictures of the artist elsewhere on the album cover?"

As most audience members found that the collage design was too complex, I decided to see if this was improved by adding a black and white filter to the images. 
As this did not improve this design by a large extent, I instead decided to neaten up the edges of the island design and to use this for the final design as it received the most positive feedback from individuals from the target audience I asked for feedback from.

Responses to Magazine Advert Designs Questionnaire:

Requesting Permission to use the band Have Mercy's song "Lean"

Contact Details Taken From The Band's Website:
http://wearehavemercy.com/contact

http://www.synergyartistmgmt.com/

Subject: 

Request to use the song Lean by Have Mercy for non- profit, educational purposes

Message:

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to request permission to use the song "Lean" by the band "Have Mercy" for  non-profit, educational purposes. As part of my A-level in media studies, I am creating an unofficial music video and relevant print artefact designs (CD digipak and a magazine advert). This unofficial music video that I have created will only be displayed on a minor YouTube channel, solely for the purpose of being able to embed it into my advanced portfolio blog which will be viewed and marked by an examiner later this year. In order to avoid copyright infringement I am writing to seek permission to use this song, and I must stress that if  my music video is later taken down, or the audio is muted due to copyright infringement then this could have devastating effects on the marks I receive for my main project. I hope that you will consider this request as I am a big supporter of the band and their music. 

Yours faithfully, Celeste Adams

Task 11: Print Artefacts: Magazine Advert Designs

First attempts at the magazine advert designs:


Questionnaire to gather audience feedback on initial designs:


I plan to distribute this questionnaire to my peers and individuals I would consider to be the target audience for my media products and artefacts. Responses will be scanned and embedded below and in a seperate blog post entitled "Task 12: Audience Feedback". Once I have these responses I can edit my designs accordingly and create a final version and prototype of the magazine advert.

Editing

When editing my A2 music video, I decided to use adobe premiere elements 9 instead of adobe premiere 6.0, which I had previously used when editing my AS media project of the opening sequence of a thriller/ horror film called "sub-rosa". I personally find adobe premiere elements easier to use as it has a simplified format in comparison to adobe premiere 6.0, whilst still offering the same amount of tools and effects to use when editing.

Another reason for my choice to use adobe premiere elements when editing instead of adobe premiere 6.0 is that adobe premiere elements was available for me to use at home, meaning that I could bypass the problems related to time limits and technical difficulties such as limited storage space and faulty hardware that I had previously encountered when choosing to edit in my sixth form's media editing suite.

The first thing that I needed to do when editing was to upload the footage from my camera's SD card to my computer. Then, I could import this footage to the editing work space in adobe premiere elements. I did this by dragging the video files from the folder they had been saved to on the computer into the open adobe premiere project. This then brought up a message that took me to the miniature "video importer" screen shown in the image below.

This will then copy my film clips to the workspace of my adobe premiere elements project, where I can drag them onto the editing timeline.

As I am making a music video, the most important aspect is the song itself, so the first thing I have done is to drag the mp4 version of the song onto the work-space timeline.

To remove the video from the audio track, I had to press the "Alt" key and right click on just the video track (shown in blue) before pressing the "delete" button. This leaves me with just the audio track of the song, allowing me to place my own video footage over the song.

Then, I had to remove the audio from my own video footage, so that only the song can be heard in the final music video. First of all, I selected all footage and audio on the editing timeline.

Then, by right clicking once everything on the timeline was selected, I could choose the option "Delete Audio". As this applied to all of the footage that was selected, by using this method I only had to remove unwanted audio tracks once.
Now that I had the audio track of the song and all of the footage, I could trim down the footage that I wanted to use and arrange it along the timeline in areas where it would complement the lyrics and/or tempo of the song. I discovered that the shortcuts for the razor tool (which allows you to cut and divide footage into separate clips) was pressing the "c" key. By pressing the "v" key, this then returned the cursor back to the normal selecting arrow. Unfortunately I could not get a screenshot to demonstrate this as the cursor does not appear on print-screens taken on a computer.
In order to ensure that my music video conformed to the convention of having the editing pace match the tempo of the music, I found that by setting markers at certain points on the timeline helped me when editing to identify key or significant changes in the tempo and lyrics of the song, letting me where to locate important video clips on the timeline and where to locate transitions between video clips. To set a marker, I chose the location where I wanted the marker, then clicked on the small blue symbol located between the video preview section f the screen (top right) and the timeline at the bottom of the screen. I then selected the options "timeline marker", "set timeline marker" and "unnamed". These markers have no effect on the actual video footage, and just act as an indicator for me to use throughout the editing process.
I soon realised that some of my footage contained too much dead space. To counteract this , I zoomed into the footage. To do this, I had to select the footage that I wanted to zoom into. I selected the footage either by simply clicking on it, or double clicking on it to open up another preview screen, as shown on the screenshots above and below. I then selected the tab "Edit" from the list of options along the top of the left hand side of the screen. At the bottom of this new screen, there is a button labelled "edit effects". By clicking on this, I was given the newdrop down options of "motion" and "opacity". 

To zoom into the video clip, I opened the drop down option labelled "motion" and moved the slider along the option "scale" until I was happy with the amount I had zoomed into (or out of) the original footage.

Once I had zoomed into the footage, by clicking on the video display at the top right section of the scree, I could drag the footage by the small circle that appears in the centre. This allows me to move the zoomed in footage in a way that moves the deadspace out of view, so that only the important action in the footage is focused on.

Progress Update 20/01/2017

As my work on editing the footage for my music video continues and I finish the creation of my print artefacts, I have began to write the script for my responses to the four evaluation questions.

In order to gain a greater level of feedback and criticism from my target audience, I plan to create a survey containing my completed print artefact designs. Then, after finding which design the majority finds the most appealing, I will either choose this as my final print artefact designs, or I will make further alterations based on the feedback given by my target audience.

As I write my responses to the evaluation questions, I have also been considering how to best present these using new media technologies, as this was a weakness in my foundation portfolio last year.

Task 11: Print Artefacts: Magazine Advert Initial Ideas

Task 11: Print Artefacts: Analysis of Existing Magazine Adverts