What we learned from audience feedback.

As a group we wanted to ensure our video was suited perfectly to our target audience. We found that through feedback from our target audience we could develop and change our video to make it more entertaining. 

People often mentioned that some of our cut away shots were too quick, so by slowing them down to a more steady rate our audience found it easier to view and could see the shot of more clearly.

Majority of our feedback tended to be quite positive so we were really pleased with the outcome of our video. However this also could be seen as a negative aspect as we were unable to make important changes that the chosen audience might not of picked up on. 

We chose our audience accordingly to the target audience for the genre of music, and the type of artist. 

We found that by asking people to view our video they found that they couldn't comment on certain things as they weren't clear what they were looking for so by writing out a set list of questions to ask, this proved more productive. 

Our questions asked about the props used and mise en scene etc. therefore we got a more analytical response for our music video.

Analysis of 2 Digipak's

Rihanna's Digipak is similar to our initial idea as it features the flower on the disk and this fits in with the themes in the video. Also the pictures on the case show the artist as the main feature and we feel this idea would work well, but as it would be hard to make the cover original we are trying to think of other ways we can make the cover more original but still with the artist as the main focus.

  This Digipak also has a clear main colour matching with the artists hair. The colour red is also a connotation of sexy so it appeals to her male audience. The digipak also features lighter shades of pink so whilst being sexy its also feminine appealing to young girls. 

This Digipak has given us a lot of inspiration as in the video we featured sweets and love hearts and similarly Katy Perry has the theme of sweets throughout her Teenage Dreams digipak.

Both digipak's feature light pink colours to appeal to a young girlie audience but also feature the artist being sexy to attract the male audience.

Maslows triangle

Abraham Maslow is an American psychologist who suggests that each person has different layers of need and work through each until self actualization is reached he suggests that each 'layer' needs to be satisfied before a person can successfully move on to the next. However Maslow does suggest that most people never really successfully make their way through all the layers so never truly reach self actualisation.
The first music video was accepted into society due to a person's want to be someone else. A person accepts and interprets the video to suit the music. By discovering new videos they gain status from listening to certain things who others have yet to discover. This obviously causing a constant need for new upcoming music and music videos. psychologists have done various studies into what people listen to, and when asked what music they like they often don't say the music they really like (such as guilty pleasures) they would say something that suits the person they want to be. The music they say they like tends to fit into main stream norms, and not the person they truly are.

Researching kate nash videos

Kate video nash moodboard

As 'Merry Happy' does not have a official video, we have been looking at other kate nash songs as inspiration for our video and we created a mood board of imagery we are keen to use for inspiration for our video for example we like the idea of using 2 of the couples possesions to represent their relationship as the toothbrushes in 'foundations' do.Furthermore we like the idea of using vintage a retro pieces in our video such as viynal records and vintage/retro clothing to replicate kate nashs' quitky video style. Furthermore the moodboard shows the food trays that have faces on them this is somthing we would like to replicate using cheese on toast as it is mention many times during the song.Futhermore in the video for pumpkin soup there is imagery of 'love hearts' which we are thinking of using in our video during the section of the song before the begining of the couples breakup.

Social Media

Social media is a way of promoting your product. For example when promoting an artist and their music using social networking sites can be a quick and easy way of spreading the word as people who like what is being promoted can then pass it onto their friends and can be publicised easily. Also as majority of people now have access to Internet either through a phone or home computer through technological convergence the song/artist and music video can be spread all in one place and can be accessed in various different ways such as downloading. If creating a fan page or fan base you can also buy advertising slots at the side or top of social networking sites so it isn't necessary to be a part of it whilst being involved in it.

Twitter is a new social networking site that has become increasingly popular over the last few years, It was created in March 2006 and launched in July. This site allows people to send and view posts known as 'tweets'. This site does not have an acceptance option so this allows anyone to follow your blog or you to follow theirs meaning it is a lot easier for people to access your page therefore it would make it easier to access what it is you are promoting. In this case we are promoting the artist Kate Nash and the song and recently created music video Merry Happy. By following a large amount of people on the site it gains people 'followers' and by advertising the name in large letters its more obvious so people are more willing to explore your page.

Facebook is a social networking site which was extremely popular and is still largely in use. Created by Ark Zuckerburg and his college friends Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Facebook was released February 2004 so sometime before Twitter and as twitter has become more popular Facebook users have decreased. Facebook can be used in a similar making your own independent profile about yourself you can then view request and accept various other people. Once you have a facebook profile you can then go onto creating your own fan pages. By adding Friends and accepting friends you increase the number of people who can view your posts, therefor making it simple to advertise a fan page you may have created. Facebook fan pages are quickly spread throughout friends as once a page is joined others can see that people are joining the page and then feel the need to also join. This is also a quick and easy way of advertising through social media as you can upload photos and videos.

Google+ is a recent idea which works the same as Twitter and Facebook. It is similar to a blog and has the same functions yet you can view other peoples blogs freely in a similar way as twitter you can 'follow' certain peoples blogs and by posting pictures and updates on your artist and the music video or whatever it is you want to promote. Although this is not as popular as the others and isn't often used.

Inspiration/Influences

Intended Institution Analysis

After conducting our focus group we got an idea of the types of music channels watched by our Target audiecne the feedback told us they enjoyed watching an array of channels such as 4music,  MTV and Viva.
Since this is a group of women we consider our target audience we began to research what type of music video will be showing our video in order to reach this target audience.

4music is a channel that may be interested in showing our finished music video.The channel has proved popular with out target audience.And some of their programmes are often geared towards females of the same target audience such as 'Keeping up with the Kardashians', 'Dirty, sexy things'. These types of reality shows are normally associated with audiences of young women. So we may be able to show our videos near to when these programmes a scheduled in order to appeal to our audience.

МТV is another music channel that our focus group showed interest in. I think it would be a good idea to show our video on this channel as often their programme schedule appeals very highly to a young female audience programmes such as 'Jersey Shore' '16 and Pregnant' and music from artist such as Pixie Lott and Beyonce help to engage our intended audience.Furthermore magazines that may be interested in reporting on our new single may be magazines like 'NME' a popular music publication and Kate Nash has been featured on the cover on NME before which indicates that they would be willing to include her as part of their magazine in order to promote our new video. Furthermore Kate Nash has been the winner of a NME award showing that her music is well recognised and enjoyed by the company and their readers.

Intended Audience

Leah Smith is 16 years old and has just finished her GCSE's. Leah is a girly girl with a rock/indie edge. She loves quirky new fashion statements and experimenting with her hair as she is an aspiring hairdresser. Leah loves being with her friends and going to new upcoming bands gigs. She is often on social networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook and Twitter as she loves promoting and finding new bands to introduce to people. Leah loves to stick out and be different from the norm. Leah is a perfect candidate to be our target audience as she loves promoting new bands and artists and as Kate Nash isn't a very mainstream artists I feel Leah would love the opportunity to promote her. 

 Jessica James is 18 years old and has been nicknamed JJ by her close friends. She has an energetic boisterous personality and is quite a tomboy. She loves just listening to music that suits her mood and enjoys learning new songs on the acoustic guitar. She often performs in her local pubs and clubs with her guitar. She aspires to tour the world with her favorite guitar. She currently works in a local music shop selling instruments, her whole life revolves around instruments and music.
JJ would be a good candidate as she loves to learn new songs and then perform them at her gigs, this would be helpful as a lot of Kate Nash songs are acoustic or can be learnt acoustically so she would be able to play them at her gigs and promote Kate Nash's songs to a wider audience. 

Codes and Conventions of a Music Video

I found through watching various different music video there a three different formats of music videos, performance, narrative and image. The performance based video would involve the singer obviously performing either on a stage or in a general performance setting.
Here is Rihanna in her 'Cheers' video. This is a clear example of a performance type music video as it shows her performing on her tour on stage.

A narrative form of a music video is simply a video that follows a specific narrative that is often created by the lyrics. Narrative can also tell a story of a narrative that isn't followed in the narrative but it must have some form of storyline. Most narratives in videos follow either a love relationship beginning or a love relationship ending.

Here is Taylor Swifts video 'Love Story', this video follows a narrative which goes with the lyrics.
Image is where the videos focus is mainly on the artist or artists. To make sure the audience don't loose interested the artist is shown in a wide range of locations, involving a large amount of costume changes.

Here is Beyonce in her video (1+1) this video shows shots of her and only her throughout the video.

Fiction Records

 ^{Fiction records is a British record label founded by Chris Parry in 1978 that is best known for being home to successful ban 'The Cure' for more than 20 years .The formerly independent label is now owned by Polydor, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group.}

Universal music group is an American Music group and it is currently the largest group in the music industry.It is the largest of the ''big 4'' record companies (Emi, Sony, and Warner). By its commanding market share and its multitude of global operations. Universal Music Group is an entirely owned subsidiary of the french media conglomerate Vivendi.

 Vivendi (formerly known as Vivendi universal) is a French international media conglomerate working within many areas of media such as music, television, publishing, telecommunications, the Internet and video games.

A conglomerate is a combination of two or more corporations dealing in various forms of business but which all fall together under one larger institution under one corporate structure or group, usually involving a larger parent company and several other subsidiaries. Often, a conglomerate is a multi- industry company.

Evaluation of AS blog.

My year 12 blog I think was a strong point of what our group did. I think our blog had a lot more strengths than weaknesses. I also think the pictures above are examples of strengths within our blog. For example, in each post we demonstrated a lot of detail and research, we presented evidence showing that we worked hard to find what was needed. We also had quite original post ideas for example, by using Google earth we could physically show the examiner where we were filming. This meant that it was easy to visualize the environment around it and we also contributed pictures of the inside of the house. We had a lot of video posts showing us doing different tasks. For example we had a video which involved myself and Natalie textually analysing film posters. We sped the video up and added music so it wasn’t boring to watch.

Negatives on our blog I would say mainly consist of how often certain people posted and how rarely others posted things. I think that contribution in our group was more biased toward certain people although we shared out the tasks we thought certain people would be able to do. For example we would use to each others strengths. Although we found it hard to rely on certain members of the group and because communication wasn’t good we found it hard to encourage others. This meant we became a split group so there was confusion between who was doing what blog post and became unorganised.
Despite this I think overall our blog was mainly positive and consisted of some good blog posts and we didn’t let our group differences affect us too much.

Evaluation of Year 12 Blog

When I entered my URl into wordle.net it picked out the most commonly used word. It then changes the size depending on how often it was used. The largest being the most used word. Clearly the word most commonly used on our blog has come up as 'shot'. I think that word was most use because in my year 12 production as a group we were organised when we went off to film. So we'd plan in detail what we'd need to do. For example we knew what shots we wanted to use how many and we made sure we used a wide variety of them. Also my name occurred often within the blog as I was acting in the thriller so we talked a lot about what I had to do and how I was going to portray certain scenes and what would be involved. Another word which is clearly shown to be larger than the others is the word 'shows'. This word was used often and I think it’s quite important because we often explained how we wanted certain things in a scene to be portrayed. We would analyse the deeper meaning behind things and what that would mean to the audience. Audience was also another word that’s come up and I think that the audience is one of the most important things as they are the people who will be watching your thriller or your music video and the reason were making them is for the audience, it’s for people to watch. Obviously that would mean that throughout the making of the thriller audience was a key feature to the decisions we made so was mentioned a lot because we documented ideas for the audience.