Ancillary Tasks

Final Music Video

Question 4

Question 3

Audience Feedback Evaluation

It was evident that most of our feedback from peers was generally positive, although we did receive some useful criticism which lead to some minor adjustments and improvements within both the video and ancillaries.

Taking your audience feedback into consideration is essential. Firstly because your audience are going to be the main consumer of your product; so you should really try and adapt your work as to what your audience prefer as a whole for overall success.
As a whole, we discovered that the teacher’s feedback became more useful to us than feedback from peers as it was more detailed and provided us with more improvements to make our productions more successful.

 

The majority of people preferred the album advertisement to the CD cover within our ancillary. This may be due to the original images used, or because our layout was highly conventional, which is what our teacher said was most successful. A common improvement received from our peers was to change the fonts used within the ancillary task; whereas our teacher feedback was that the font was used well and looks appropriate. I think that although our audience could clearly see that the genre was Soul, the font may not have suited best. However, our peers may not have common knowledge that the sub-genre of this song and artist is Neo-Soul. Neo-Soul reflects such a vast variety of experimental artwork and ideas within hard copy/online distribution and promotion (see example below). On the other hand, some people even said that there were not any improvements needed! We were humbled by this sort of approach, but felt that there is always room for improvement.

Jon Kennedy's new mixtape artwork

- Neo-Soul Artist

For our music video, we received positive comments such as:

• Great performance by artist
• Use of a wide variety of shot types
• Advanced use of editing effects

From a critical view, feedback from our viewers told us to slow down green screen footage to create a more realistic effect, or minor adjustments to cutting on the beat or ensuring that lip synchronisation was completely accurate. This was done by adjusting the footage on top of the soundtrack by mere milliseconds, which was often a monotonous procedure. 

Also, an audience who have only watched our video once or twice - which will be the case for the majority of people - may have a different perspective. Their point of you will be completely different to ours due to us viewing our work hundreds of times throughout the production of our final product. This can give you a warped view of the video, particularly if you have worked on a specific section for a long period of time. As a result, what they essentially miss you may have to make less subtle; and what your audience like and don't like may lead to you having to tweak or adjust parts to their preference.


Green Screen Improvement - Before & After

Here you can see a clear improvement which was first brought to our attention by our audience. Beforehand, we had left the green screen looking how it did because we were too focussed on ensuring that our editing was on-the-beat. At first, the green screen footage didn't sit well with the rest of the video. Consequently, I adjusted the shot duration of each clip to a more suitable length, flipped shots to create an aesthetic variation and included slight slow motion. Although we could not slow the clip down entirely (due to the camera and shutter speed used to film), the slight differentiation of speed makes it seems less like reality. I decided to mix up the cutaways of the green screen with other shots. I debated as to whether it would be better to have the main attention on another visual, whilst cross-cutting glimpses of the falling concept. This lead to us superimposing the 'electric' shoot with the Leake Street tunnel shots. The layering of lights and graffiti was also a colourful success that pleasantly juxtaposed with the dark, black and white green screen footage.

 

First Draft

 

Final Draft

Question 2

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

Question 1

Ancillary Editing - Update 21/01

In this lesson we started work on the album advertisements. To ensure that our advertisements are conventional, we researched previous ones on Google images. The ones we found had a lot of the same conventions - a release date, where to buy, reviews, record company and distributor logos, album title and artist name.

Final Video

Tubechops - Edited Cutaways

Editing - 21/12

We have now included the footage most recently filmed into our video. We thought that it laid best within the middle section after I have travelled to Central London. After it had been superimposed with a long shot of Leake Street Tunnel, a rippling effect of the lasers lights had successfully been created due to the use of low key lighting. The clip is quite subtle within the mix, making it seem more polished than effective. Here is a segment of what will be the third draft.