Audience feedback 2...

After adding in our narrative we wanted to show the new video to a group of media students just to see if they have any comments for adjustments we can make. We also wanted to see if they prefer the music video with the narrative or without and if they understood the story we were illustrating. 

From  reading the comments the overall opinion was that our audience much prefer our video now it has a narrative as well as the performance, they said that they understood the story and that they loved the ending. From doing this audience feedback it has made us more confident in our narrative and we are pleased it has had such a positive reaction. Although there are a few adjustments to be made from some of the feedback we will take these on board and make the changes we feel are needed.

Hozier - Take Me To Church

Whilst watching the music channel on TV I came across the music video to Take Me To Church by Hozier, this gave me some ideas into how we can incorporate our narrative into our existing music video. The opening of Take Me To Church is a wide shot of a bonfire, the video then cuts to some shots of the narrative whilst cutting back to close up tilts of the bonfire throughout the opening to the video, this instantly gives the bonfire some significance and will stick in the viewers mind. As the video progresses and the narrative unravels we see the importance of the bonfire and it is used as the very last section of the video as the shocking element in the narrative.

By having the short cuts of the bonfire at the start of the video it makes the link to the bonfire in the narrative at the end a lot more important and seems to create even more of a shock to the viewer. We decided to try and create this effect by having shots of the pebbles near the start of our video and throughout, which made the connection to the narrative and the ending of the video. 

Editing...

Sticking to our schedule, after school me, Tara and Stef continued the editing. So far we are really pleased with the new footage and it has blended in well with the existing video and the narrative has defiantly added a lot more and we have been able to cut parts that were repetitive.

Shooting schedual...

Now that we have decided to add a narrative to our video we felt that it would be helpful to create a shooting schedual so that we have a clear structure of what we are working on.

Once we created the schedule we went straight out to begin filming, unfortunately I had lessons in the afternoon so I couldn't stay long but Tara, Ciara and Stef went out and continued filming. After filming they returned back to school to upload the footage and begin editing, at this point I was able to joint them and we had a very successful editing afternoon.

Narrative...

After receiving our audience feedback it was clear that the overall view was that our music video needed some type of narrative to make it less repetitive and add more substance to the video. We decided to take these comments on bored and create a narrative that could fit into our existing concept of footage.

With our existing shots of the forrest and the lake we came up with the idea of our protagonist committing suicide by drowning in the lake. We were inspired by the story of Virginia Wolf and how she committed suicide by putting stones in her pocket and walking into a lake. This concept would fit in perfectly with our existing video and will only mean filming and adding in shots rather than changing the video.

Audience feedback...

We asked our media class to watch our video so far and give us some constructive feedback on what they liked and what they think we could improve on. We felt that they were the best people to ask as they may have some creative ideas or useful changes we could make to make our video the best standard.

We then decided to create a list of the adjustments we need to make to our video from the audience feedback we received. We realised that the majority of people said that they felt the video was very repetitive and needed a narrative story as well as the footage we already had to create more of an impact and add substance.

Cutting down the song...

Whilst editing our footage we realised that we needed to cut down our song as it was too long and we would end up having a lot of repetition in our video. The song was originally 4 minutes 34 seconds but we have decided to cut it down to 3 minutes, this not only stops us from having too much repetition in our video but also ends just as the song comes down form the climax which flows well with our video. This is further explained in the vlog below.

Props/ Iconography...

An important feature in our narrative is the use of Iconography, we used pebbles to symbolise the stones Virginia Wolf used in her suicide, the pebbles also linked to our theme of nature and fit in well with our miss en scene.

 

 We also used the Graffiti wall to symbolise an urban street location and to heavily contrast with our words/forrest location in our other shots.

Black and white filter...

After looking into many different Inide Rock bands I noticed that a recurring pattern in their videos was the use of a black and white filter. Bands such as Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks and The Killers have all used a black and white filter in at least one of their video's all of which have automatically caught my eye and stood out to me. After seeing how powerful the black and white filter can be in enhancing the mood of so many videos it influenced our choice of using the black and white filter in our own video.

digi-pak research...