W H AT H AV E Y O U L E A R N E D F R O M Y O U R A U D I E N C E F E E D B A C K ?

E VA L U A T I O N N U M B E R 3 :

Over the course of the editing process, I received lots of help from feedback from different people at different stages of my construction process.

Prior to finishing my rough cut, I showed what I had to my teacher, and these we're his criticisms.

My initial response to this was to try and use a variety of shots of the guitar, close ups, etc. However this became a problem as the footage I had of the guitar close ups didn’t have the singing on top of it, so I couldn’t tell from what part of song it was supposed to be from, so I initially ignored that piece of advice, and by not using these to intercut the other bits of footage, the pacing remained more or less unchanged.

The first piece of advice thing I took from these criticisms was actually to use more effects in the video, and it was at this point I got the idea to change the performance parts of the video to black and white. This would distinguish them better from the narrative and would also add more effects into the video than I already had. Another effect I attempted was the use of page turning as a transition from certain scenes that received mixed reviews when it came to my audience feedback.

Page turning transition: Application of the black and white effect:

The next set of comments I received where from a former student who I bumped into and showed him my video, to which he said:

These comments were easier to respond to as they were simpler technical issues, however the process of rectifying these problems was difficult. Firstly, the point about how certain performance shots were to an angle I was not able to fix as adjusting the angle in the editing suite cut out too much of the shot altogether.

Noticeably to an angle by looking at

brickwork in the background

When the tilt is applied to the shot, it cuts a very large section from the artists head, So I believed it was better to keep the shot at an angle than have such a

noticeable chunk of the performers head missing

Fixing these colour corrections proved to be tricky as the difference in the colour was affected by the light, and how it changed in the shots. Even when changing it to get it as close to similar as possible, it sometimes still appeared subtly different but was as close to the same as could be.

This was a problem that only existed for the POV shooting as the camera used for it was not as sophisticated as that of the camera used mainly to shoot the other footage.

Colour balance that

had to be changed for this part of

shot .

After finishing the rough cut of the video, I had my teacher look over it again, and the same comment arose as to the variety of performance shots. This time around I tried to adapt the footage I already had to get different distances, but because the camera was slightly out of focus and it was filmed in the evening, I needed to film more performance shots to remedy this problem.

The use of the page turning transition became somewhat of a controversial issue for my music video as, it was used too little and was seen as a little tacky. However, when I ran my class focus group on the rough cut, the effect was praised by some. Ultimately I decided to remove the effect as I agreed that it would need to be used more in order to justify using it, but there were no other good places to use it as the imagery created by the lyrics limited the effectiveness of it.

Exert of transcribed focus group relating to the page turning

transition controversy.

I ran this focus group in my class as I didn’t receive any comments on YouTube, where the rough cut was uploaded. But something I noticed from my focus group was that there was some confusion as to whether the person performing the song was the stalker as well.

I mentioned that I wanted to keep the stalker’s face out of the video despite what was said in the focus group, however I did try to illustrate better that the two were separate characters within the video. I did this by rearranging some shots of when the performance and narrative cross over so that they flowed better as no one seemed to notice that point within the rough cut.

Originally these two shots were separated by one of the stalker breaking into the girls house, I thought it had been made clear enough that these two events were happening simultaneously, but when it came to noticing the narrative and performance crossover, it went unnoticed. In order to fix this I put the two shots next to each other and added a transition so that they melded together better, to try and illustrate as clearly as possible that the two were right after one another.

Shot 1 - girl walks down street Cross transition between girl walking and performance Shot 2 - girl walks through performance shot

In order to make this more clear, I debated making the second shot in colour to show it was a part of the narrative as well as performance. However I decided

agains this as I thought it was more a performance shot than narrative, and so it should follow the colour pallet of other performance shots.

(Sequential order of shots as they appear in final cut)

After filming extra performance shots for the video, I was finally able to address what my teacher had said in his first and second comments, relating to how I needed a better variety and close ups of the guitar to break up the performance so it didn’t appear “too static”. These did make the editing process much easier, as where there were parts that the lip syncing was slightly off I could replace them with newer bits of footage. And it looked better having a larger variety in the final cut.

New Footage