Final video

Finishing the video

We really wanted to finish the video so that we could put it up on to you-tube, and focus on other products! 
Me and gabs proofed and 'finished' the video. Which meant we had to watch it through again and again to see and fix the little mistakes, which could seem little to us but to an audience it would absolutely kill the video. 

We did all these final touches because it gave the video a hollywood feel, expensive and cinematic.

We letter boxed the video: 

Played around with the colour grade aswell to make the contrasting colours pop: 

 
Due to a music videos form it is innately boring, to help with this its advised to use elaborate editing, which we did. As well as doing this expressive editing, we took out a lot of the strobing because they stopped being expressive and got irritating because an audience couldn't work anything out. We did keep some effects such as when Hannah blows the bubble we do it then reverse it which works well with the beat and also makes the video a bit more interesting. 

We put in 'Maria' at the start of the video in the font that we have used on all products; we did this so that the branding could start.

Making the Digipak

Me and Ned started to make the digipak. Before we chose the pictures to edit we looked at similar artists to ours...Ellie goulding was an obvious one as she is an established pop artist. Her pictures on the digipak looked like this: 

It became apparent that close ups of the artist was the most obvious. The pictures also were flawless- i encaputed this ideal beauty bu using a shallow depth of field camera with an 80mm lens, this smooths lines and imperfections and made maria look as young and beautiful as possible. Here is a picture of what Ned had previously drafted with Kim Kardashian. This initial idea was to do eyes to match the song 'i got my eye on you'; but this was an album not just a single, and it doesn't establish Maria, which is dangerous as she is a new pop artist and its important to start the branding so her first album should be all about image. 


Then we went on to picking the photo we wanted to use, me and neds photo shoot went so well that there was a lot to choose from, here's some pictures of how the process started:
FONT AND PHOTOSHOP

The font we used is one we bought online, its the iconic Maria logo and is useful for merchandise and branding as its her own individual font.

PHOTOS FROM THE SHOOT

Here are the pictures we took, heres a giff i made: 

We now need to make a choice of the ones we will use for our products and then start editing on Photoshop.

Me and Neds afternoon of fun and photos

Me and Ned new we had to take pictures for the website and for the digipak, so we took it upon ourselves to do it! I organized a time with Maria: 

 I looked into her wardrobe and found her some clothes to wear for the shoot which looked suitable and sassy. We set up the camera and the lights and we were on our way.

Focus Group: Feedback

Explain what feedback was given:

Gabriel took the lead and recorded the feedback as he had most storage space on his phone. I wrote out a list of questions for each product. Questions like 'From this digipak what would you think the genre was?' etc. The comments are recorded and put above!

They loved the video and they said it was the first one they have seen were the genre actually fits with the video. The had little criticism for the digipak although they said that the colors don't really match as the ones in the video are more pastel than the digipak; here's a picture of the digipak we constructed: 



We also obviously needed to change the images from Kim Kardashian to Maria.

The biggest criticism we got was for the website, which was painful as me and Carla both did it.
It was great to receive feedback though because we obviously want our products to be the best they can be. http://carlaknight2.wix.com/maria

They said that on these pages:

 

You can hear them saying the problem they had with the website and sadly they all put up their hand to say they had an issue with it.

The problem is that the videos and the text covers her face; so we cant actually see her. We realized the error and knew we needed to change it.

Here we asked them more about the website- a girl gave us advice about the font we used- you can listen below.

We looked at an artist called 'foxes' website.

We really liked the way she laid out her pictures and then the content. Image on one side and content on the other.
I then organized a photo shoot with maria to get more shots for the digipak and also for the website. It was going to be Monday the 8th as i have some time off from musical rehearsals. 

What is a focus group?

A focus group is defined as: a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging.

It is important that we test our own products at this (rough cut) stage because we can change it to appeal to our target audience.We want to make it work more effectively and the only way we can do this is to have input from other eyes. It will inform our post production decisions. 


We looked at some youtube clips of previous focus groups. The first one we watched was a clip from the apprentice where he was pitching different biscuits.

We evaluated why this pitch went well. Its because....

• He didn't have a fixed answer that he was looking for, so without trying he was receiving new information. 
• He was asking open questions, didn't try and lead conversation 
• He was extremely friendly. 
• He didn't challenge any of the views and try and defend his product, so he welcomed all of their views and ideas. 

We then watched two other focus groups that didn't go so well.

 




They didn't seem to be as successful because: 

• because they both had a fixed outcome in their mind 
• they ignored comment that challenged the product 
• they have blinkers on, their blind to any type of criticism 
• they made a mistake by explaining how the audience is meant to interpret what they have seen; which inevitably ruins the point of a focus group as they are just feeding the audience what they want to hear. 

As on thursday we will be running a focus group ourselves we will test every individual product by... 

• Video:projected on big screen, and voice memo response
• Digipak: physically make it as accurately as possible so that we can actually hand it to them 
• Homepage: get them to go on it themselves to see how easy they found it to use and how fun they found it.
• We want to also ask how well they work all together. Any differences between them?