Conclusion

I feel that this project has gone very well and I have enjoyed interacting with Simon Bates. It has been a very different experience to that of working for Tony Jones, or Five Leaves Publishing on my Capture project. When working for Five Leaves Publishing I had no contact or feedback from the client whatsoever. I just had to make the product and hand it in.

When I worked for Tony Jones for a commission I was asked to edit film reels together for use at the Cambridge Film Festival. Whilst doing this I received small amounts of feedback from the client every now and then, along with them sending me extra things to do a lot of the time. However working alongside Simon Bates has been a fresh new experience as we were able to freely exchange and swap ideas. This partnership has been far more productive than on my other projects.

Working with a partner rather than for someone/a company has been much more productive and I have managed to get a lot more out of it as well as I believe both parties being far more satisfied with the result of the finished product.

Response to Simon Bates' Feedback

I feel the feedback our group was given by Bates was encouraging in some areas, but disappointing in others. As for the information factors of our video, we got full marks on most of the informational sides to our video, which I was very pleased about as we took a lot of care to make sure everything was featured in our video. We did not score so highly on the aesthetics of the video. The sections requiring it to be fast, appealing to the correct age range and using effective live footage were all given a three out of five. I wasn't at all pleased with these and was surprised that it was that way around as our group holistically is one that focuses more on the visual aspects of our video being effective.

Feedback from Simon Bates on the Finished Video

Live footage:

3/5

Made good use of the lighting and active shots. Great build up but did not follow the way that the scene had been set.

Requirements for getting in:

3/5

Covers this point.

What you get if your band is accepted:

5/5

Covered this point really well and effectively.

How to apply:

5/5

Well illustrated

It must be contemporary:

4/5

Like the lifestyle 'live your dream'. Good effects.

Fast:

3/5

Fast section gains interest but overall video is slightly short.

Appeals to the 14-17 age range:

3/5

Would appeal to the upper part of this age group but not earlier part.

Supply all relevant information:

4/5

Yes.

General comments:

Many good ideas went into this and many of them seem to be on the cutting room floor. It's a great video but suffers slightly on contemporary feel and how many of the original ideas were left behind.

Extra Logos in Video

Before we finished our videos Bates gave us a folder of eight logos that we should place at any point during our video. We simply had to display all of them at least once. These logos were those of the organisations that had been involved with assisting or funding this project. He explained that it was vital for these to be included in the videos.

The first one is the Junction logo. Being the main organisation involved in this project we already knew that this one would have to be included and had previously placed it at an appropriate point in the video.

The below logo is that of the Parkside Federation. It is another consortium involved in the Creative and Media diploma in the Cambridge area.

The logo shown below is the Cambridge Regional College logo (or, CRC). It is the other college involved in the C&M Diploma.

Skillset is, along side the Arts Council England, on of the organisations involved in funding this project.

The Quality Badge for Learning Outside the Classroom is a scheme that Bates is involved in. It is awarded to organisations that assist work related learning in out of clasroom activities, in this case it was the Juntion allowing us to film in the staging area.

The final logos were those of our college and our diploma.

Similarities Between Our Video and Music Videos

In many ways our video (especially the intro) has more in common with modern music videos than it does with promotional videos. Here is a video for Cage the Elephants; In One Ear.

In this video they use such things as cutting to the beat and fast splicing of the video to make it exciting. It is clear that they have used the most exciting visuals that they can for each shot which is exactly what we wanted to do for our video. We cut through copious amounts of footage to get to the clips that looked the best. Cutting to make the footage energetic is such an important technique and something we tried to replicate.

Reflection on our Video

The overall outcome of our video was pleasing to an extent. It didn't really have the visual impact that we were looking for however this may just be a side effects of having our hopes too high. The visual cutting styles in our video (especially in the sound-check sequences) are quite similar to ones seen in a short snippet of this video. It uses the tension of the setting up to make the introduction of the music more effective. Look at the video between 0:15 - 0:23:

Comparison to Other Promo Videos

Here are some other promotional videos.

The below video is one for the band Enter Shikari. This video uses cutting techniques much like the ones we used in our video. In this video there is quick cutting, used to maximize the dramatic feel to the band and make you want to go an see their show. We used a similar technique when cutting our promotional video, we wanted the viewer to see it and think how impressive it looked to be on the Junction's stage, and for that to make them want to do it too.

The video below is very different to our video. It was a video made for the Cambridge Film Festival 2009. It is a good example of making something to suit a certain style. In my video we cut quickly to the rock music where as in this one they have tried to replicate old stylised spy films. These films had a very slow pace, and were much calmer than, say, modern action films that may use the sort of cutting that our video does.

The Finished Videos

In the end we decided to make two separate videos. One is the promotional video, this contains all of the information and most of the ideas we pitched to Simon. Shown below:

The second is the trailer for the next section of our pitch to Bates.