The End

“Everybody thinks pop videos are glamorous but it is almost 100% full of bastards” Keith Richards.

I disagree as my pop video was pleasant, I had a good group of people to work with and we were all very aware of what needed to be done, so we all got on with it. However I did not work at the same level as him and therefore I may be wrong. But then again Keith Richard is a rock star and they are known to be very temperamental, so I am pretty sure I am accurate in saying that not 100% of pop video are bar-stewards. In fact my experience on a whole of the pop video has been testing but always interesting and challenging.

I have really enjoyed the creative process of this pop video and loved putting together and creating an idea and really bringing it to life, through the Digipak, the video itself and even this blog! This blog has explored everything from the research and development, the first pitch and ideas right through to the production/shoot day and the final result of the pop video. It has truly been a seven-month labour of love. However as much as it saddens me that this process is over and we will have to move on, it will bring me a slight joy to know I can finally put this project to rest.

It was not all smooth runnings along the way; we did run into a few problems. For example we had originally planned to have several band members into the video and have lots of shots of the band playing together, however unfortunately on the day we realised that the band members did not work as none of them could play any of their instruments and in fact were very uncomfortable in front of the camera. However we managed to make it work without them in the end.

If I was to do this project differently again I think I may have thought out a narrative element within the video as I think the video is quite plain on its own, however that may be because I have watched it through several times! I just think it would have been more interesting to explore the narrative of the lyrics and do something out with the black box set. Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed this project and I am sad to move on, although at the same time I am glad to put it to rest and move on to my future projects.

Blog Task Three: Audience. What I learnt from my audience feedback.

To assess our audience feedback we collected a variety of data for our pop video and ancillary products from members of the target audience and from our audience demographics – via YouTube, a Focus Group, our peers and our family. For our focus group I tried to use open questions throughout to gather a more effective response from the viewers.

Our target audience is 15-25 years olds and I can also apply Jictar groups A, B, and C to our audience as they could probably handle the serious message of woman in society. Group A are intelligent and would be interested in social issues such as the one we are conveying in the video, group B would also be moderately interested and group C is the majority of people who would probably find the video interesting to watch. I think our pop video would mainly apply to females as the artist is female and the message of the video does portray woman trapped in society or perhaps feeling lost and I believe a lot of females would be able to relate to this, however I also think that perhaps we may have a market for gay males or males who are attracted to our female artist.

On Youtube we had 456 views and five likes. As well as that we also had two comments one was from ‘caz2435’ that said:
“This is really cool”
Another was from ‘dkeofhazard’ which said:
“Whoever made this video is amazing, I love them!”
This is a first hand response to our video directly from our target audience and was good to see how people where reacting to our video. Yes is does not tell us whether or not they got the message of the video but it does tell us that people are enjoying it and are interested in our artist and brand. I think this is very important.

We held a focus group with ten people, six males and four females. Six were eighteen years of age and four were seventeen. We held a focus group instead of giving out a questionnaire as a questionnaire can be very passive, when people don’t have to give a direct answer they can sometimes not take it seriously or be very vague. Where as with a focus group we were able to get a first hand response to the video and also so that we could pin answers down and press for more information that we wanted, as well as that it is a more comfortable environment to be able to chat to our target audience about their initial response. The questions we asked our focus group were:

1. Did you enjoy it?
2. What did you get from the video?
3. What message did you get from the video?
4. What persona for our artist did we established?
5. Did you identify wit the character, if so how?
6. Did you feel a personal relationship with the character, if so how?
7. Were you informed by the video, if so in what way?
8. Did you get the idea of women being ill treated in society?
9. What did you think of the video not having a narrative?
10. Ways it could be improved could we have done in differently?

Our group on the main was very helpful, some were quiet however some were very good and made some insightful points. I think that possibly the group could have been slightly intimidated coming into an A2 class and trying to give an intelligent response to the video however I think on the whole we managed to make them feel comfortable enough to give us a good response. This is again another good reason to do a focus group instead of a questionnaire.

We tried to use the theory of Blumer and Katz on ‘uses and gratifications’ to assess our audience response. Blumer and Katz say audiences respond in four ways: Personal Relationships, Personal Identity, Surveillance and Diversion. These uses and gratifications is what an audience expects when they watch television: a personal relationship, where the viewer feels they have a close personal relationship with the artist. Personal Identity, the audience feels like they can identify with the artist. Surveillance, the viewer feels informed by what they are watching. Diversion, the viewer feels diverted from their normal everyday life by being distracted by what they are watching.
The question was, did ours respond to our pop video in this way. Well our definitely applied to personal identity:

1) The audience identifying with characters on the screen.
We were trying in our pop video to get the viewer to identify with the young, modern, innocent female artist. It worked in the main. Of our focus group (six male and four female) six identified with the image. Hannah a down to earth 17 year old from Surrey said, “living the dream, who wouldn’t want to be a star”. On YouTube we had, as mentioned earlier, 456 views in six weeks and all the comments were favorable. One viewer ‘caz2435’ said, “This is really cool”.

2) The audience feels a personal relationship with the characters on screen.
We were trying in our pop video to get the viewer to feel a personal relationship with our young female artist in our pop video. We did this by using close-ups and other techniques and I feel this worked on the whole. Of our focus group seven felt a relationship with the artist. Natalya a young 17 year old, fresh teenager said, “I definitely felt I could relate to her.” This shows that people can feel connected to our artist in some way.

Stuart Hall has a theory that producers encode a preferred message that the audience decodes in the one three ways. These are where the audience accepts the preferred reading and message, or rejects it by being oppositional, or negotiates their own interpretation. Our preferred meaning was the women are constrained and society keeps woman in cages and we need to break free. Out of the ten all the females and two males got the message and four didn’t register the meaning at all. Lively Hannah said “You can tell she is trapped and wanted to break free out of the cage.” Where as Patch a male student who’s appearance didn’t fit our target audience said “She looked pretty but I didn’t get why she was in a cage or the message.” This shows that we are roughly hitting our target audience correctly.

Aristotle had a theory that obviously did not apply to poop videos or television as they were not invented in his time but his general categories can be used to analyze how media texts work on audiences. His theory is based on three main areas: Ethos, Pathos and Logos. Ethos is how an audience responds to characters and stars credibility. In our pop video we created an image in the singer, she is serious, lively and carries a bit of gravitas and this helps us establish our brand. Pathos is appealing to the viewer’s emotion; star status can influence and persuade views. Logos is persuading audience through words. Our pop video definitely does this through lyrics.

Director's Commentary - Audio Recording

This is our director's commentary we have done to show an audience how we created our pop video and what we were intending with each shot. This gives the audience an insiders views as to how it was created and makes them feel like a part of the process and like they are involved. To do this we went through the video and explained the purpose and effect of each shot, we filmed this sitting in front of the screen so that we could 'hit the screen' in time with the video.

Blog Task 2: A Powerpoint Presentation To Explore How Effective The Combination Of My Main Product And Ancillary Text Are?

I created a powerpoint to address this question by exploring four key areas:

THE CONCEPT OF STARDOM THAT RICHARD DYER HAS DEVELOPED. I wanted to explore how we could use the ideas of a star, including being youthful and rebelious, and the two paradoxes to create a star and a brand.

THE IDEAS OF THE FILM THEORIST CARLSON, as he explores the idea that singers and bands are one or more of a commercial exhibitionist, a telivised bard or an electronic shaman. Our singer was the middle one of these with perhaps a touch of the last.

THE CONCEPT OF UNIVERSAL MYTHS THAT LEVI-STRAUSS ORIGINATED. Since our singer was exploring serious messages in her song i wanted to see how you could apply such big ideas to pop music.

SYNERGY. I argue in the slideshow that it is vital for the pop video to play of the magazine advert, to play off the digipak cover and all of them to work together to develop the brand of the singer.

Blog Task 2

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