MJ- The Performance Footage

To get the performance footage I (Mary) went to a 'We Are The Ocean' gig at the Cockpit in Leeds. She took her HD camera and managed to get a fairly good position at the front to film from. Due to it being a live gig, the lighting effects are easily noticeable on the footage. The only way she could have stopped some of the strobing from effecting what the camera picked up, would have been to use a real industry camera ( which was not available for us to use as we are just a-level media students!).

After getting mixed comments about this footage we wanted to get further feedback from our target audience (which is 15 -24). To do this we screened our work to people from outside our media class. We decided to chose from outside the class because the opinions of others in the class would be heavily altered by watching the video so much, which wouldn't happen normally. Also they might have also been more critical as they are media students and working on their own music videos although we have used their opinions in other pieces of feedback throughout the duration of the project. All feedback we got was either positive or neutral. People thought it really added to the feel and atmosphere of the video, it proved the footage was real, thus appealing to the target audience more and the pace of the flashing lights also reflected the pace of the music and the genre (of post-hardcore and alternative rock). Because we thought some of the footage could of looked damaged this could of also reflected the fact that the central protagonist's life in the video at that time is also damaged. To verify this feedback, we asked some people from our secondary audience (24-54), this was largely in favour of the footage also. Furthermore, from our genre research, we have found videos from the alternative rock and post-hardcore genre have real life footage, quite like mine (obviously they would have better equipment, such as cranes and film cameras). What we have learnt from this feedback is that the flashing performance footage generally adds to the video, proving its real and that the target audience likes it.


We experimented with trying to remove some of the strobing by taking stills of the performance footage without it, but this made it too jumpy and really didn't look good. Our second idea was to add the Final Cut strobing effect to see if it evened it out or improved it in any way. However, it just made it slower and with more flashes and just didn't look right at all. We then looked through the other footage that Mary took, but non of the We Are The Ocean footage was without strobe lights, so we couldn't replace it. 

Overall looking at the performance footage we are really quite pleased with the outcome and the way it looks and we  think that it reflects the genre of the music and the pace of the song and it works really well.