Evaluation Question 3

We participated in a class feedback activity. The activity involved watching each member of the class’ music video’s which they had created. We then had to leave a rating out of 10 and also some written feedback.

We received on average a 8/10 from our peers. The comments included:

Good

“The band look good together”

“Change of location is effective”

“Great linking to original video”

‘Love the dancing”

“effective camera angles, and good variety of shots used”

‘editing is of a high standard’

‘instrument shots are well timed’

‘like the dancing’

“shows the personality of each band member, which helps to add humour”

Bad

‘Lacks a narrative idea?”

‘Some shots look to long - dancing’

Overall, we were happy with what our classmates thought of our video, they could see that we wanted the video to have a strong link to the original Bombay Bicycle Club video and furthermore that we were trying to make the video pretty funny with the band not taking themselves too seriously.

With the feedback coming from people in our class, they can obviously relate to how hard and frustrating editing can become at times and for people to actually comment on how good our editing skills are gave us a great sense of achievement.

We were constantly receiving constructive feedback from our Media Studies teachers. They helped to give us new ideas when we were lacking some and also gave us advice on how to improve our draft at the time to get it to the standard that it is now. One of the main points we were told was to reduce the length of a few shots and also re film parts with a HD camera to give a professional edge to our video.

We took on board all of the advise we were given and we did actually cut the length of quite a few of the shots and, as advised, added in extra footage of the band skating or just hanging out.

We start off here with a screen shot that was taken from my Facebook account. We simply posted the link and asked for some kind of feedback…

As you can see from the images a lot of people thought that the dancing was a really good addition to the video, it was a common comment that was left by our friends ‘Jamie’s dancing was the highlight’ ‘Dancing was amazing’ and with other comments that were people joking around saying that ‘people were jealous because they couldn’t dance like that’. I think that the reason that our dancing shots were so popular in our video was more than likely due to the fact that it brought great humour to the video with many people also commented that they believed that the video was in actual fact amusing as well as being a professional looking music video.

There were several other comments with some praise of ‘splendid’, and several comments made about how good the Christmas light shots in Leicester  looked with Ed playing the keyboard underneath them with him moving across the street.  We were also congratulated on our mouth close ups where we had the camera losing focus as the singer breathed which someone picked up on so we are happy with that.  The various locations were always something we felt looked good so to get confirmation on that through feedback was good as we knew that the look and the varied shots had worked and other people had picked up on it and also felt that it looked really good.

Furthermore we were congratulated on one of the opening shots where we had the view out of the train signifying that we were on a journey. There was various comments saying that people felt that the skate boarding shots looked really well and in particular Steff commented saying how she thought we had the lighting on these particular outside shots spot on and how it worked really well.

There were also more serious with some criticism. We did say to people we welcomed the negative feedback, as it would help us learn on what we didn’t get so right and how we could improve it for the future.  

A couple of people commented on the link saying that they didn’t really get the inside the shop shots, which is exactly what we wanted so that we could give them our explanation as to why we did it. We decided to do the in shop shots as we wanted to add a bit of humour once again I thought if we could have some kind of ‘hide & seek’ game it would work well. Obviously though we needed short and snappy shots in order to fit in with our genre, so we decided to have each band member popping out of the clothes rails in time with a word from the song as this would ensure that the shots didn’t drag on at all and that they remained short and snappy.

Another criticism we received was that ‘the boys look to embarrassed’ we felt this was slightly unfair, however we appreciated the comment. There were other people that then retaliated to that comment which was really good, implying that they didn’t personally believe that the boys were embarrassed at all and that in actual fact the girl commenting that she thought they looked embarrassed was in actual fact just jealous that they couldn’t pull off such moves.

Finally, we took the amount of likes we got as a positive, with many of the people liking the link not actually leaving a comment. We have since had even more likes and a few more comments.