In this voice recording I will be answering the question, what have you learned from your audience feedback? 

In the early stages of my research I conducted initial audience feedback to gage what type of music video’s people enjoyed. I did this by emailing links to three very different music video’s and asking people to reply with their response. I sent this e-mail to a variety of people from siblings to teachers to get a variety of responses. I learnt from the results that people enjoyed creative music video’s with a loose narrative. This feedback led me to develop my narrative accordingly. 

During my research and planning I discovered that The Nationals main target audience were American males, between 25 and 40 years of age. If my text was a published, real media product it could be specifically targeted to this audience by, for example, advertising in different parts of the world or targeted advertising on social networking sites. 

Unfortunately, I had no such facilities so I distributed my music video via Facebook and Twitter after uploading to YouTube. After posting my video on my Facebook wall the views went from 28 on YouTube to 98 in a matter of days. Yet this was only reaching a niche audience which mainly would have been UK teenagers.

Yet this got the job done and people were able to view my work and form an opinion on it. The online feedback I received was positive with two likes on YouTube and 9 likes on Facebook, yet no verbal, specific feedback was obtained. Knowing this, I directly showed people my music video and asked there opinion. I asked an 18 year old, UK male who liked the locations and the contrast of long and short cuts. I then asked a 50 year old, UK female who found the narrative slightly confusing but thought the editing looked professional and impressive.

I believe that feedback is crucial throughout the process of creating my music video and I think if I were to do it again, I would have conducted more informal research into what people want from a narrative. It was easy for me, during production and post- production to envisage the outcome and therefor I think I rushed too it and missed details out which could have made it confusing for the audience to follow. Whereas whilst I was editing I could have shown people the video as I went along and if necessary edited differently or reshot parts of my music video to meet the audiences expectations. 

I spent a lot of time researching throughout this project trying to get a flavour or different music video’s spanning genre, age, music etc. which I think helped me create a believable music video. I specifically focussed on previous music video’s of The National’s and the types of conventions they conformed to and subverted. 

I really loved the original Fake Empire music video as it was creative, conceptual and beautiful. I tried to recreate this euphoric, vastness of both the song and the video. I did this by using broad landscapes such as the beach and on top of the hills, this both helps the narrative on and sets the scene. This is also a reoccurring convention in mellow genre music. In the original video, I liked the timings which help create great contrast between the scenes, suggests a passing of time and links the video directly to the song. This is something in post- production I was keen to achieve as I thought it was very reflective of the quirky genre and elevated the intensity of the story. 

I decided to make the characters in my piece silent and merely puppets to replay the narrative I envisaged. In the original video, the characters begin silent and then begin to perform the song. I did not want any performance in my piece as it would have looked misplaced with only two characters and would have disrupted the mysterious air I created around the characters. Even though I subverted this slightly from the original video, I think it is quite common to have no performance or visual interaction in a music video. I also think that this helps the music video more timeless for example if I had the character contacting each other by phone or driving to meet each other in a car, then in a few years time both the car and phone will be outdated. 

Some of the scenes, the quality and the colour of my video are quite distinctive and possibly unusual of a video made in 2011. I decided to go with this almost retro 80’s style for my video as I thought it was appropriate for both the song and the narrative. Reoccurring scenes such as the record player instil the throughout the video, which I think also effectively opens and closes the video and makes it feel like a convincing whole piece.  

I decided to create the photographs for my ancillary tasks in a studio style setting to make it convincing and professional. This shoot was simple but I think the results were really effective. Having studied both art and photography I was able to use photographic idea’s such as the rule of thirds and rules of composition to create original, creative photographs. I think that the random nature of the playing cards on the white background reflects the ‘alternative’ nature of both the music and the target audience. I am a firm believer of less is more which I think is demonstrated in both my ancillary tasks which are simple photographs, simply edited. I think this makes the impact of the pieces great as it gives the audience confidence in the product because of the translucency of the advertising. 

This is the promotional magazine advertisement for my album. I have used a photograph from the same shoot as the photograph for my album cover to create consistency, I decided against using the exact same image as the photographs are so simple I thought it could be uninteresting. I also decided to edit the advert the same as the album cover again to create consistency between all three of my products. I used the bare minimum of text to add importance to the content of the text that was chosen, it tells the reader everything they need to know, the band, the album name and the release date. I am really pleased with the final outcome as the simplicity makes it look professional and believable and if I saw this in a magazine and liked the image I would research more into the type of music and watch the music video which would make sense of the playing cards image, creating publicity for my other two products.

This is my finished album cover, for The National’s single Fake Empire. I have adjusted one of my photographs on iPhoto by reducing the saturation and adding a warm filter. I then imported the file into Adobe Illustrator 5.0 on an iMac to add the text and angle it to compliment the photograph. I saved it as a Illustrator file, opened it in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and transformed it into a JPEG which would compromise the quality but made it small enough to be saved onto my USB device. 

I really like the colour and sharpness of the image, the fact that the picture cards are closest to the camera adds depth of field, this is also accentuated through the use of focus which is strong in the foreground and blurred in the background. I decided to use this colour because it mimics that of my music video which is grainy and 80’s style which I thought was appropriate for the genre of music and the people it was representational of. I used a font serifed font, in capital letters. I thought that this traditional style, both juxtaposes and reaffirms the image, the font of the text is very different to the text on the cards but it matches the traditional nature of the images on the cards and the familiarity of playing cards. For me it was important to leave the space at the top of my album cover free as it suggests that the image continues, for example if I had put the text in the space at the top it would have looked too contrived. I like the depth and sense of light and shade in the photograph. 

The diameter is a standard size of a CD case is 5”x 5”