Evaluation question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Piece of feedback Feedback given by What was learnt from the feedback

The narrative is too harsh for someone to pay attention to without having to think too hard

A member of the class during the 25 word pitch

Music videos are played on TV music channels as a main part of their viewing. People often watch music channels after a day at school, work, going out etc. And generally when they are relaxing and because of this, the music videos that get the most air time tend to be the ones with fun or relaxed narratives, and therefore by using such an in depth narrative target audiences may enjoy the video less.

Mise en scene is not relating to the subject of the video enough

Mr smith when watching our first draft

Just to start off on this point, we had decided that Mr Smith did fit into our target audience, and therefore his feedback as a teacher and a member of the target audience is potentially the most reliable that we received in the project. Without Mise en scene being accurate to the focus of the video, it would seem somehow lacking in continuity, e.g. there would not be a continued theme all the way through the video and the video would have an incomplete feeling to it.

Not enough people are actually aware of the illuminate conspiracy to make active use of all the effort that is being put into this side of the video

A member of the class when watching the first draft

This was taken on board, as it occurred to us that the fact that all three of us were aware of this conspiracy and happened to end up in the same group was pure coincidence, and only a few other people in the class, when asked, were aware of the conspiracy. Also as a side note, the majority were only aware of it because of texts such as “angels and demons”

etc. To retain a key link with the key audience, but still have a message to put out to the rest of the viewers, I used much simpler symbolism in my final product. This allows a closer connection with the target audience, e.g. those who understand the deeper details in the conspiracies; however it still conveys the basic meaning to the audience who do not. An example of this is the blindfold, as mentioned in other evaluation questions: the blindfold represents a number of things, the most obvious of which is the loss of sight – however this can be perceived as loss of power, and in this way it shows that there is something being hidden, and since the singer would not put the blindfold on himself, it further suggests that there is someone or something else involved, e.g. a controlling power which is actually hiding something from the singer. But to take this further, those who are aware (the target audience) will be aware that this is referencing the illuminate.

The first draft is not clear in its narrative, only part of the video tell me what is going on. Some of the scenes do not show me what is happening, even though there does seem to be some sort of vague narrative somewhere in there.

Mr smith when watching the first draft

In a video such as a music video, you can’t use language to convey the narrative, and therefore getting the plot across to the audience and without speech as an easy way of clueing in the viewer, the narrative must be clearer in every way, which is something we learnt from this piece of feedback. We then found two different ways to tackle this: first of all, there was the obvious option of using more mise en scene, better shots,

better continuity, more clear narrative in general etc. However, we found another way of doing this: we tried using a simple subtitle in more difficult parts of the video. We used this in our second attempt with me and Harley, but in the end when I decided to go for a much simpler video, it was not necessary, however I would have liked to have done this if we had used the original video, as it would show I have researched different ways of conveying the video’s plot and maintaining a more complex narrative.

The song itself is four and a half minutes long, which sets a challenge for a good video, let alone giving a 30-60 second introduction

Mr smith when watching the first draft

Having realised we had shots missing, areas where there was no footage at all etc. What Mr smith had said actually made the excuse for us: we had been on a tighter schedule than anyone else in the class, trying to edit which was effectively five and a half minutes of footage in the same amount of time in which others were editing an average of just three and a half minutes. Obviously coming from a teacher such as Mr Smith we knew we had to take this on board, as he made it very clear that our intentions of creating a 5 minute video were impractical, unrealistic and generally unachievable with the schedule that had been set. For us to continue with our original plan of introducing the song in this way would have been, in hindsight, suicidal, as far as the coursework goes, so we knew we had to re-do this. Acting upon this we completely rewritten what

would come to be our second draft, which was still massively off the mark from the final project, but we did cut out the ridiculously long introduction, as we knew if we continued to attempt to incorporate this into the project, the quality of the entire music video would be at stake.

At this point in time the video seems to be just a load of shots of two guys walking down the street, and if I’m honest I can’t understand how it relates to the song

A friend whilst watching us construct the first draft

A friend named Nicky made this brutally honest comment in which she basically told us, that to her, we were simply sequencing together what Levi Strauss would have referred to as socially recognisable debris, simply because so far, our draft still had no context to her except for the intertextual references that we had crammed into it, such as the bath scene, in which our protagonist woke up in the bath as a reference to inception. Even though we did end up changing the final storyboard, Nicky’s comment was not an influential factor in this, as Nicky did not have any knowledge of any of the relative theories which are needed to apply to the video, and therefore she would not be able to interpret the video in the intended way anyway. However, whilst this excused her not understanding the relation to the song, it was still true that we had failed to organise the information in the correct, interpretable way, and this was another reason why we needed a simpler narrative.

Intertextual references don’t mix with a complex narrative very well in the space of 4 minutes worth of video

Mr Ford, my other media teacher, came and found me whilst I working in the computer room after reviewing several posts on the blog about intertextual

Mr Ford’s basic point was, that after looking through my blog just to check up on progress, he had noticed an abundance of intertextual references, and no matter how much it

references seemed like it would help us, it was just too much to work into a video with this much background behind it. It only takes a quick glance at some of the research posts on the blog to see just how much detail there is in the conspiracy, and that was proving difficult to keep up with in itself, let alone trying to fit in 3 or 4 intertextual references. Again, with Mr Ford being a teacher I was always going to take any advice he gave me, and in the end we ended up cutting all references out of it, leaving more room for simple symbolism, which would allow us to refer to the actual subject of the video rather than other media texts. Also, as we are beginning to study in our postmodernism theory at the minute in class, references are often seen to be potentially bad tools to use in texts as it can take the focus away from the actual meaning, for example, the intertextual reference to the riot control officers in the pretender video by Foo Fighters (which was itself a reference to a previous text) which we had intended to use in the original storyboard could have taken the focus away from the fact that the illuminate are secretly controlling the continents of the world and made the audience think about the Foo Fighters.

You need the subtitles to look deliberately like those in battle royale so you do not lose the meaning

Several sources, including Mr Smith and Mr Ford

We asked a multitude of people to look over the video for opinions (mainly friends at first) and most of these actually said that the subtitles, which we had used to aid our

narrative, looked more cheesy and unprofessional, than clever. We had to bear in mind our target audience in this situation, as they also played an important part in this: we had asked people from within and outside our target audience and not one of them had realised wear the reference was from, and rather thought the subtitles were just s lazy way of putting across our narrative. Mr Smith and Mr Ford both said exactly the same thing to us: that the subtitles have to look like those in the film they were referencing, otherwise they would have the previously mentioned effect on the audience. In the end we decided not to use the subtitles for a number of reasons, listed as follows: We were using a very simple plot for our final product and therefore did not need the subtitles; if the video needs subtitles, then generally speaking it must be to complex (the audience should be able to follow the plot without the subtitles); the subtitles played alongside the lyrics, which distracted the audience from doing both, which is a problem in a video such as ours when the video actually is reflecting the lyrics; No one actually seemed to recognise the reference, and therefore, people would interpret it as something different, and finally, as mentioned previously by Mr Ford, to many references would crowd our narrative with other media texts and “socially recognisable debris”

as Strauss would have called it.

There is too much information involved with the theory for us to cram it all in through mise en scene, this would just confuse the audience

Mr Smith In our second video hand in, we had tried to cram basically every conspiracy theory since the illuminate began in the 1700’s through mise en scene, e.g. posters on the walls, checklists of deceased presidents and artists etc. All in the agent’s office, and this was all too much for the audience to take on in one video. This was before we made the choice to go to the simpler narrative, and it seemed that in the exact way we had included very little relevant mise en scene in the first video, we had included far too much in this one, and had given the audience to much to think about for them to enjoy the video.