Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

In terms of ancillary feedback, we sketched out our main three ideas for our magazine advert as a small poster and then used the website ‘Poll Everywhere’ in order to gain feedback on which magazine advert design looks the most effective. The website 'Poll Everywhere' is a very effective method of feedback because we could use a large group of students aged 16-20 from our target audience to vote for their favourite poster meaning that the poster will be catered towards our audience and what they like and dislike. The only downfall with the bar chart form of poll everywhere is that the members of the audience cannot comment on why they like one poster more than the other or whether they liked certain aspects of two different posters. However the bar chart is a quick and easy way of discovering the most popular poster design and we can develop it further by asking members of the audience after the poll. To conduct the poll, we labelled the three designs and attached them to a board. We then set up the poll and asked a large group if people in the room to text in either A, B or C to the poll and vote for which poster looks the best. Poster A received the most votes with 50% and so we used this as a basis for the development of our magazine advert:



We used ‘Poll Everywhere’ again for the next piece of feedback on our ancillary tasks. We used a ‘comment wall’ and asked the question ‘What are your opinions on our digipak?’ Again we attached the image of the digipak on the wall at the front of the room and asked the people in the room to text the number with comments about what they thought about our digipak. The comments were all very positive with the most popular comment being about the use of selective colour. The red lips stand out dramatically against the black and white filter while other comments were about the typography looking effective. This form of 'Poll Everywhere' is more useful because the audience can comment on what they think about the digi-pak and this way we know exactly what is working well and we know exactly what we need to improve:

I wanted more in depth feedback on both the digipak and the magazine advert and so decided that the best way to do this was to post both images of the products onto a social media site. I decided to use Facebook because it is the most popular site which meant I would receive a lot of feedback. I asked our audience to post in the comment section their opinions on the ancillary tasks.

Posting on a social media site resulted in being an extremely effective way of receiving feedback from our demographic. Because the people commenting were my Facebook ‘friends’ they were aged between 16 and 30 and this was the target age range for our product. Using Facebook also means that I have taken the audience habits of my psychographic into consideration because Facebook is an extremely popular method of communication and sharing data by our target age group and Facebook is place where they explore new products and videos. The overall reaction was extremely positive with repetitive comments about the black and white filter, the selective colour and typography as well as comments about the interesting images used on the digipak. There are also repetitive comments about how eye catching the two ancillaries’ are, which a very good piece of feedback because the purpose of the magazine advert is to advertise. There is also one comment about the images creating a clear selling point which is helpful feedback coming from our target audience. From this feedback it is very clear that our demographic enjoyed the two products and it is also clear that the two products possess effective synergy, mostly linked by the use of filter, selective colour and typography. One downfall of using Facebook was that the people commenting were my 'friends' which meant they could have been biased however they could comment whatever they wanted and because some comments were repeated it suggests that this is an honest answer and lets us know that this aspect of the digipak is successful because it has been mentioned multiple times.

We posted the three versions of our music video on YouTube and this is useful in attracting the target audience because our music videos appear in the ‘suggested’ section to the right side of the screen when the audience is viewing our artist, Natalie Lungley’s, music. This means that the audience who is interested in Natalie Lungley’s music will notice our music video on the page and may be interested in viewing it. We also received a comment on our music video on YouTube from a person who is impartial to the school or my media course and this comment is incredibly positive and compliments our camerawork and editing. This is important feedback because it suggests that the production is appealing to an audience other than students at school. The image also shows the amount of views received in just under a month which is a positive indication that the video is successfully being noticed by YouTube users.

Overall I feel as though we have used many forms of feedback during the different stages of planning and developing our three music promotion products. The feedback has proved to be incredibly helpful with our development and how we have improved the products. All of the audience who we have asked have been aged between 16 and 30 meaning that we have successfully gathered feedback from our target audience and catered our product towards our selected demographic. The methods of getting the feedback have also been aimed towards the correct psychographics and socio-economic class. The importance of gathering feedback from the correct target audience cannot be under stressed and we think that the results of our various feedbacks can be seen to be acted upon when viewing our three final products.

Facebook feedback from Dsquared, a Web Software Engineer company:

One of my Facebook friends saw the ancillaries that I posted on Facebook and he works at a media company. He messaged me asking if I wanted any feedback from him and his co-workers at the Web Software Engineer company:



He mentioned that there were a few things that could be improved in order to make the ancillary tasks more effective. He asked if our typography had different weights and I replied that we had added a drop shadow to the texts in order to make it more bold against the background. He then mentioned that I could use the clone stamp tool in order to make the background more blurred and darker so that the text would not need a drop shadow and would still stand out. These were some of his messages:

Below the image on the left is our original ancillary Magazine advert and then the image on the right is a quickly made example that Jason and his colleagues created to explain what they meant about darkening the background and using the clone stamp to remove the window frame:

 

It was interesting to receive feedback from someone who works in a media based job and who has extensive knowledge of how to use software such as Photoshop because we received a piece of feedback that we had not received in any other method. It proved that posting the ancillaries to Facebook was a great way to receive feedback and not just on the post asking people's opinions. Facebook proved to be an effective way of catching people's attention and getting a great range of responses about our products, while even though Jason was a Facebook 'friend' his work colleagues helped to explain and edit the feedback whom I do not know and so the feedback was honest and effective.

Question 4

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

Created with Padlet
 
Created with Padlet  

Screencast showing aspects of editing that went into creating our final music video:

    Screencast showing aspects of editing that went into creating our final ancillaries:

 
We used iMovie to edit the production again this year because it was easier to edit straight away rather than learn a completely new program. Since using iMovie last year there have been significant updates and lots of new professional features have been added such as the ability to choose how long overlay shots fade in and out for and the opacity settings have been refined so that the shots blend better together now. We took a different approach to editing this year by putting the whole song onto the project first, along with a video that was the same length of the song and then cut the one shot on the beat and then replaced all the cut sections. This made it easier to move shots around because you could tell how long they needed to be when selecting them- this made for greater accuracy with lip syncing which overall made the production more effective. One problem with iMovie is that it doesn’t have all of the professional tools that other editors like Premiere Pro have, such a selecting singular colours, objects and a timeline with multiple streams of video and audio. We have developed our editing skills this year even though we used the same program, because we developed faster, more accurate and efficient ways of organising the shots on the timeline that allowed us to edit much faster. Because we were able to edit our production so quickly we were able to act on audience and teacher feedback quicker and we had more time for improvements. This meant that we had time to improve the production twice so there are three cuts overall.

A MacBook Pro was used to edit the production, which was a benefit because we were able to edit outside of lesson and school time. Using a Mac made our group more productive because Mac OS X is much easier to use and faster than Windows, and because it was a member of our group who owned the Mac we could keep all of the files on it without worrying about losing them or someone else moving them. For the ancillaries a member of our group had their own Microsoft Surface 3. It has direct pen interaction that allowed us to edit the images far more accurately using the touchscreen. Despite the Surface running a low powered Intel Atom processor we were able to run multiple layers and intense effects on Photoshop without it slowing down too dramatically, which is an issue we had with the school computers. We were also able to install custom typography onto the Surface, which meant that we could use it on both of the ancillaries and the video. We could not use the group member’s Surface to edit the music video because iMovie isn’t available on Windows 10, and the processor isn’t fast enough to handle professional video editing- also pairing the slower processor with only 4GB of RAM, there would’ve been significant slowdown in response time which isn’t good during video editing.   

Examples of more diverse and inventive shots, due to the use of two different cameras:

The above shots were filmed using an iPhone and this allowed us to get closer to the objects and move the iPhone around to make it pan around the object.

The DSLR camera and tripod were helpful when filming extreme close ups of the lips and shots of the actress when she is sat still because it helped us make sure that the shots would not be shaky and the actress could move around the frame or stay still rather as opposed to the iPhone when we could move the shot around the object instead.

To present all of our blog work this year, we created two blogs to makes it organised and easier to navigate. On one blog we would create our individual posts and then use the HTML links on these posts to put onto the pages on our main blog. The tabs used were ‘Home,’ ‘Preliminary,’ ‘Research,’ ‘Planning,’ ‘Production’ and ‘Evaluation’. These tabs were a very effective way of organising our work so that it was easy to navigate and find certain posts because the links in each tab redirected to the posts on the first blog. This meant that the work could be done in any order or I could add any posts and the main blog will still be organised. Blogger also allows you to embed videos and has a useful feature that allows you to embed a YouTube video while still on your Blogger post. However one downfall with Blogger is that it is very difficult to post photos to accompany the blog post you are working on because they do not stay in one position and you cannot manually resize they to what you desire as you would be able to in a Word Document. In order to use Blogger it is necessary to have a Google account. This also links any services owned by Google to you account for example YouTube. This became very useful because to use any Google services, I only needed one account and could log into Google with my Blogger and YouTube accounts readily logged in and available.