Evaluation Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We uploaded the video to Facebook, in order to get some audience feedback from other users. Generally people liked the video; however, there were one or two criticisms. The fact that someone had said the phone number idea wasn’t very clear made me think that we could have illustrated this in a much better way. Our initial plan was to have someone giving the main character the number at the beginning of the film, however due to complications with filming we never managed to get the shot. I think if we had done this, it would have shed light on the whole idea of the video, however I quite like the way that by not including this, the narrative of the video is slightly ambiguous. In addition to this, the way that (as noticed by Paul Waiting) we made sure the moment that he picked up the phone the sample of the girls voice comes in gives the audience a clue as to who the number belongs to.

Another comment was that the editing was slightly slow in parts, so we lost the energy of the song. I would agree with this and I think had we the chance to do it again, it would work better if the cutting rate had increased at the time that the song became louder and more energetic. I think when editing the video, we were more concerned with the narrative and almost lost sight of the relationship with the music unless it drove the story forward. I think this also led to the point made that there perhaps wasn’t as much footage of the band as there could be, however many music videos of a similar genre don’t feature the band at all, so I think this could be really down to personal preference.

We also carried out a focus group within our media class and got feedback from our classmates. Comments from them were all very positive and examples included; ‘The dissolves worked really well’, ‘The split screen in conjunction with the colour and monochrome really helps to separate the narrative from the band performance’, ‘The narrative of the following of the thread is really engaging and the video is edited very well as a whole’. Another aspect that was mentioned was that we had made use of Barthe’s ‘hermaneutic’ or ‘enigma’ code very well in the sense that there are many questions that arise in the audience’s mind in response to watching the video such as ‘who’s number is that?’, and ‘where is this thread leading?’.