Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback that we have received from our teacher and fellow students has been very helpful when working on our improvements. Each person who has watched each rough cut has given us 3-4 comments, some have given even more. The comments were both positive and negative, which helped us more as we could then see what elements of the video were popular with other people, and what bits weren't as popular and needed changing.

For our first rough cut, the majority of people said that our jump cuts didn't look particularly good and they didn't fit the beat of the song like our other shots did; therefore we got rid of one of our jump cut scenes, and we changed our other jump cut scene by adding a transition to it (cross fade) instead of getting rid of it completely, because unlike the other jump cut scene, this one was necessary for the narrative and getting rid of it would ruin the story, whereas the other was not totally needed in the video and we could easily replace it with another shot.  

The editing process for rough cut two involved us taking out the parts from rough cut one that weren't popular with the rest of the class, and either changing them to make them look better, or replacing them. We then showed our second rough cut to the class and got feedback for it.

Generally for rough cut two, the comments were more positive on a whole, however there were still a few elements of the video that a lot of people picked up on and said that we should change. For example, one comment that was said frequently is that we should remove some of the shots that look very dark, like the several of the performance shots, and replace them with different shots. After looking over these shots, we have agreed that we will replace them with lighter shots, as shots are very dark and it is difficult to see the lip movement of the artist, so if we replace that shot with another one that was filmed at a lighter time of day, it will be easier for the audience to see the actions of the artist. We also added the vignette effect to a lot of the narrative shots as this gives the story more of darker sense, as the majority of the narrative is to do with the female being distraught, and as the vignette effect adds more darkness to the shots, it links with the feelings being portrayed by the female.

The feedback we got from our audience after having watched our second rough cut was generally, positive, as the vignette effect was popular, and the fact that we had brightened up some of the shots, however some people still said that some of the performance shots were too dull and the colours were not very eye grabbing, like they should be, so they suggested that we added colour corrections to them to make the colours stand out more and attract the audience's eyes.

The editing process for rough cut three involved us using the colour correction tool on iMovie, in order to brighten up several shots, mainly the performance shots. The comments said that the colours in some of our performance shots were too dull; therefore we added colour to certain items in the shots, for example the we made the sky more of a blue colour, changing it from grey, as we wanted our performance shots to be as bright as possible. Also, we added corrections to the grass and bushes that surrounded our artist, as they were more of a light, boring green colour, rather than the typical grass green colour, so we made the grass a more richer green, which made the whole shot look more positive. Furthermore, we added colour corrections to the guitar that our artist was playing in the shots, as we saw that the colours were very dull and boring, after watching the video the whole way through to check the colours. Like the grass and the sky, we brightened the colours on the guitar, to make them more appealing for the audience and to attract more people. 

After showing several people our third rough cut, everybody was happy with the colours and the cuts & transitions between each shots, but the main feedback we got was that we needed to sort out our minor problems with the lip syncing, as there was a few moments where the lip syncing was slightly out of sync with the lyrics of the song. This process didn't take long as the majority of the lip syncing problems had been sorted out and fixed in previous editing sessions, meaning that there was not many at all that needed fixing. Also, we watched our video all the way through, without stops, on several occasions to make sure there was nothing else that needed fixing, and we saw that there was a shot were the transition that we had used didn't match the beat of the song, so we had to adjust the transition, by making it take place quicker than was it was originally, and this made the transition fit the beat of the song much better, which ultimately made the shot look better and more professional. 

As you can see, the colour is a lot brighter in the top screenshot, as this is from our final cut, which was after we'd edited it so all of our performance shots were brighter like this.

Overall, the feedback from each video allowed us to change our video in order to fit the audiences opinions and to hopefully result in a better, more professional looking final product. The development of each video got less as the rough cuts went on, for example we had a lot more editing and changing around to do for our rough cut two, as our first cut had lots of problems, however our final cut was not very different to our third rough cut as we had already fixed the majority of the problems that the audience had picked up on prior to creating our third rough cut. This meant that the audience that watched our video before we'd created a final cut helped us very much as they picked out faults in our work that we might not have seen, which ultimately has helped our final cut look a lot more professional and the quality of the final cut was better in general.