Focus group write up

A focus group, is a productive response process where a group of people are assembled to participate in a discussion about a product before it is launched. We arranged a focus group in order to asses the quality and impression our products make on an audience, and the way they fit together as a campaign. In preparation for this discussion, as a group we quickly ensured all products were in a presentable form. The Final cut of the video was presentable from youtube, The website was published and the link was ready on an email. In order to allow a more realistic hands on view of our digipak we printed it out and stuck it to card board in the shape of a legitimate album. This was useful for the audience so they could see it in its correct form rather than a series of images and text in the wrong arrangement.

At the focus group we prepared open ended and flexible questions focussing only on our products. For example what kind of band do you think they are? What do you think of the music video?  What do think about the website?. Unfortunately Max and I were unable to attend the focus group and therefore Ksenia lead the session and recorded all the responses and feedback. Using a voice recorder was a clear choice as the discreetness doesn't concern an audience and encourage them to think to much about what they say about our products, therefore we received a more reliable response.

They discussed all three products, raising some issues that we had noted and knew we were going to work on. The key point made was about the coherence of our campaign as a whole. they felt the digipak, seemed too distant from the other products. This was due to the rurla setting in comparison to the urban contemporary location of the music video. To correct this they suggested changing the colours of the digipak to give colder less saturated tones. We attempted this, and this was the result:

We felt that in doing this we had made the made image on our digipak less impressive dull and less striking. We felt that in an attempt to please everyone in our audience, the product had become less interesting. We didnt want a bland product therefore we decided to stick to the original purple tones.

In a addition to this feedback they claimed they loved the video, and the emotion it created, and they felt the website was a good webpage to represent the band. They way it cross-promotes other products was effective and they enjoyed the simplistic minimalist style. 

Class Feedback on the website

Editing 5 | Colour grading

The colouring process seems like an endless task. There a huge amount of tools that adobe premiere provides to adjust the colours and tones and all of these, at first, appear very complicated to use. However I began simple and then later developed the grade on each clip tweaking it till it was just right. This took around 4 hours in total to complete. Midway through the process, I captured a screen recording, Here is a time lapse to show how I coloured the video.

From watching this it is clear to see how many shots are out of place and have the wrong colours. I continued to tweak the footage till each shot looked precisely how i wanted. This involved going into great depth with the colouring. Here is a breakdown of the process.

I began by doing some colour correction. This is the process where every clip is manually tweaked to get a good exposure and balance of light. Each clip was also matched to a colour temperate which I set as a cold blueish colour. Using the built in scopes on premiere I was able to visually inspect the Waveform, vectroscope and parade levels to match each shot precisely making sure no exposures were blown out, no darks were lost and the shots looked natural. Here is a screenshot of the scopes. Although it looks complicated, knowing how to read these can make the corrections much more precise.

I then moved onto doing some colour grading this is the creative process where decisions are made to further enhance or establish a new visual tone to the project I chose a cold high contrast grade, to emulate the urban tone. Here is a before and after.

As I progressed through the grade, copy and pasting the same adjustments onto every clip doesn't mean they match up. Almost always the lighting was different. Therefore I had to match the colours on every clip. I did this through using a layer mask. This means i could select the skin tone colours and adjust only the so they still looked natural under the colour grade.

With final adjustments such as these and ensuring every shot matched. The editing process was complete. The next thing to do is to get some feedback on my video and see what can be improved before I export the video.

Editing 4: Finalised cut

With some Audience feedback, I have taken on board some advice for the cut such as slightly slowing down the pace of the studio cut, and removing some shots that didn't work.

The cut needs no visual effects therefore the only thing left to do is colour the video. This will be a difficult process as i have to bring the two sections to the video closer together visually. I need to using the levels, bringing the brightness closer to a midpoint of each clip. I also plan to put a grade over the entire video that will give it a higher contrast, coloured and more stylised look. This is often what makes most music videos look professional. I will experiment with colours and find something that suits the mood of my video. As I am going for quite an urban look with the dance I may use cold colours, with an increased contrast. 

Editing 3

after about 5 more editing sessions I have now added the dance section and completed some small adjustments to the flow of the video. When adding the dance sequence I firstly chose the best sections of dance to put in the video. I chose 6 sections out of the 10 we filmed. These were the most visually interesting and the best showcase of their dance skills. These sections were fairly evenly distributed throughout the track, giving even amounts of studio and dance footage. When i edited the dance i was concered about Graphic editing. This is where the images in the cut are matched according to similarities in their pictorial qualities (movement of actors, light and colour, shapes of images, etc.). It was clear from some feedback that some cuts matched certain cuts didn't.




For example, This cut works effectively, as the shots are both dark and the movement matches to the beats that have been previously accented by the drums.

However this cut is ineffective as it is a clear change from dark to light. I tried to make it match slightly more by adding a slight moment of slow movement at the start of the dance to match with the pace. However the change in both colour and brightness is too unexpected for an audience.



My solution to this problem can easily be solved in the colour grade, which is my next job wehn the cut is finalised.

Digipack