During period one today, I made rough key notes for each question of our evaluation and jotted them down.

During period two, I edited the rest of yesterday's material. This took the entire hour as there was a lot to do.

Then, in period three I went through each edit and colour corrected it all, mainly by warming the colours and adding more in the way of brightness and saturation. This gave it more of the intended summer tone.

There were two parts I wasn't happy with, so having conferred with Amy I deleted these entirely - they were unsaveable - and replaced them with other material.

Some parts could do with some effects, so I added "strobe lighting" to a performance part, and cut up a running part into three sections. One; played as normal. The next piece I put in reverse, by putting -100 in the speed editing box. The final piece I cut again, and added the last bit in so that my character jump cuts to the foreground of the screen. This makes the running part more postmodern, and interesting to watch. It also compliments the song's pace better.

This is the unfinished version with poorer quality that we used for our class showcase. As you can see, parts weren't in sync and the picture quality itself was a bit blurred in places with lines across the screen, and parts jolt and jump which isn't how it is in the higher quality we've been working on. Our final copy will be top quality so this shouldn't be an issue.

Update: Rhys can only take part in our filming session tonight or tomorrow lunchtime and period five, before the deadline, because he's going to Wales after school tomorrow. It's Amy's birthday today so she doesn't want to film tonight, and it's unlikely we'd convince people to help us during their lunch break, so we're filming the prom during period 5 tomorrow.

Due to a lack of time, I've decided that it would be best to scrap the taxi idea. I figured it's not a vital part of our storyline, and it would take more effort than we can give, so our time would be better spent on something else. I shared this view with Amy and Sophie, and they agreed.

Tomorrow morning, period one, me and Amy have a free lesson, so we're going (to continue in my case), to prepare points of discussion for our evaluation.

Periods two and three we have media studies. Sophie offered to continue with our evaluation notes whilst I edit, and Amy wants to put an input in on what I do.

Then, period five, me and Sophie are free so we'll continue with our evaluation notes, and prepare ourselves for recording our discussions after school time. Our teacher said that we can stay until 5:30pm; when she leaves.

Period one then on Thursday, we'll put together our evaluation recordings and combine it with Powerpoint slides and footage from our videos to illustrate our discussions with examples. As long as I manage to get my album artwork completed at home, and when I've had more of an input on our webpage (Myspace page), - everything should then be ready!

Yesterday, our teacher arranged for our class to showcase our music videos so far, to each other and some extra peers who happened to have a free period at the time. During period two we compressed and transferred our video so that our teacher could access it on her computer. Most of our class conversely, didn't manage to do this in time for period three, so our showcase began about half an hour late, causing it to run into our lunch hour. This didn't affect the quality of our discussions and evaluations though.


Although our teacher had been keeping an eye on the progression of our music video throughout the editing process, this was an opportunity for her to summarise her opinions and advice for us. Her comments, in her exact words, were:
- Love the baseball reaction
- Not sure about "fight"
- The syncing was mostly perfect
- Matches the style
- It's INTERESTING - you keep the variety going
- Seems that the style matches Taylor Swift
- Performance is really good and convincing
- Lighting on the dart board is perfect!
- The spinning looks like perfect space
- Did people get your narrative?
- Emma does evil/disgust well.. !
- Like the red lighting when singing into the camera


It was good listening to other people's reactions to parts of our video, that hadn't been watching the progression in composing it. This gave us an insight into how our targeted audience would perceive it, which we no longer have ourselves. Personally, I had been worried that outsiders wouldn't be able to follow the narrative, perhaps at all, due to the heavy number of locations featured throughout. The showcase fotunately, disproved this as everybody followed it "easily" and knew exactly what the narrative was.

The evaluation sheets involved completing a bipolar chart to begin:

Followed by the questions:
-What was especially GOOD about the music video?
- Would you watch this again? If yes, why? If no, why not? and,
- Did you notice any serious issues such as continuity errors, strange edits, did anything not make sense to you?

The bipolar results convey that generally our audience enjoyed each aspect of our music video, though perhaps we need to fine-tune our synchronising and camerawork a little.
Having read through the other questions on my own, the main aspects that people liked, involved:
- The lighting
- The performance itself
- The close-ups
- The mixture of performance and narrative
- The pace - "doesn't get boring"
- Funny at some points
- Believable miming and acting
- Strong narrative
- Story made sense
- Very much like a real music video
- The ending - lights out
- "Fantabulous" edits and effects!
- Seemed professional
- Variety in costume

Every person that took the time to evaluate said they'd like/love to watch our music video again. The recurring reason was that it's "entertaining"/"interesting".

There was some constructive criticism, which is arguably more helpful than anything else. Here are all of the issues from our pilot audience's perspectives:
- Some parts were out of sync
- "A form of revenge would be nice to see"
- "Didn't really get the fight"
- Amy laughs when I push her face in the dirt
- Brief black flashes
- Emma's face is a bit too comical at times!
- "wuh-ooh" - cut a bit shorter?
- Emma coming out of the car is odd
- Use more effects

A lot of this comes from our video still being incomplete. (Every other group's incomplete too, not just ours.) Some parts being out of sync, the black flashes and lacking a bit in effects is down to this.

HOWEVER,

The fight scene seems to have been highlighted as being too friendly and not fitting in with the video. A few people also stated that Amy laughs whilst I'm pushing her face into the dirt. I know Amy really well, so I know that when she's scared, she does look like she's laughing. Our audience of course don't know her, so it looks like we will have to refilm this part. Whether we scrap the original material completely or just add in another camera angle on the laughing part to cover it up - we'll have to see.

The "wuh-ooh" being too long with the suggestion of 'cutting it shorter' can't really be done as that would involve making actual changes to the audio track itself which wouldn't be right. We've taken this onboard though and might try to involve another camera angle to give the illusion of cutting down the length of this part.

"Emma coming out of the car is odd" we don't agree with. Every consumer is different, so although we don't agree with this opinion we have respected it and taken it into consideration, but seeing as only one person has said this, we're going to put the thought to one side.

"Emma's face is a bit too comical at times!". There is one part I could understand that my face looks comical, but it does still fit in with the overall video and genre. Also, multiple people complimented the fact that there are funny parts throughout the video, so we plan to keep it.

OVERALL,

I've found that showcasing our work has not only reassured me that our video is of good quality, it has also highlighted aspects that could potentially be issues that we had overlooked. Being able to watch and reflect off of other groups' videos also helped for me to compare and contrast and feel more comfortable with our video and where it fits in.

During period two today I converted what Sophie and I recorded on Monday outside and imported it to Final Cut. I then cut up and edited the new material to our video and compressed and converted it. Part way through period three, our class took part in showcasing each group's work to; the rest of our class, our teacher, another teacher and other random students who gave up their time. I'll write in more detail tomorrow when I have all of the evaluations miss collected in!