Interaction Reflection

After completing the Interaction project i feel that it has been one of my favorite projects of the course, i found my work being much more inspired being able to work along side the staff at the junction. Although i did enjoy working on the commission project i found that interaction was a much more fluent project and although occasionally Simon Bates was tough to get in touch with, when it came to important decisions in what to include he was available for creative discussions to create the best possible product.

Final Feedback from Simon Bates

Simon marked our videos out of 5 in 8 different areas, those areas were:

Live footage of The Fiver, What the requirements are for getting in, What you get if your band is accepted, How to apply, It must look contemporary, Fast, Appealing to the 14 – 17 age group and Supply all the relevant information.

Simon marked my group like this: 

Live footage of The Fiver	Great initial scene setting and pace, really exciting	5
What the requirements are for getting in	Covers this	3
What you get if your band is accepted	Really clear incentives, like the questioning approach	4
How to apply	very clear	4
It must look contemporary	Very engaging look	4
Fast	Great editing and speed	4
Appealing to the 14 – 17 age group	slightly more appealing to young age group but still dominated by older bands	3
Supply all the relevant information	Better approach to information	4
General comments	This is a great promo vid and you have evidently listened to the feedback you were given at B Uni.  You have directed a technically and creatively sound piece of work that is slightly pipped by moving away from the brief.  Great work nonetheless.	31

I thought most of these were fair points and all justified, although i though 3 was quite harsh for 'Appealing to the 14 – 17 age group'. we did everything we could to try and make it interesting to younger kids, we put the youngest band, Boiling Point in as often as we could and said specifically are you aged between 13 and 18, there was little more we could have done.

I also don't understand why Group 1s video got 5 for how modern it looks and we only got 4 because both videos are made with the same footage, neither with any effects and ours was cut faster, too the beat more and was generally snappier. but at the end of the day it was made to a brief, and we didn't meet said brief as well as group 1.

New promo style

This promtional video is advertising the music event Glade Festival, this is very close to the new style of video we were going for after re-making ours. It has no interviews in it which meens the video keeps a higher pace, this is good because the video is aimed at a target audience of 16 -22 year olds, this age group are the most likly to lose interest very quickly, if the video looses pace at any point, veiwers in this age group are likely to just stop watching.

Not knowing anything about Glade festival, i watched this video and instantly wanted to go to it, this proves that it is very effective and i hope our video gives the same effect to viewers!

Interactions Similar to Mine

One Interaction project that is similar to mine is the Junction Young Ambassadors take over

the Junction Young Ambassadors are a group of young people from Cambridge who assist the Junction in plans and decisions made towards making it a more youth-friendly environment. They have been running since March 2009 and some projects before included working with Architecture graduates to design a new front Foyer for the Junction building and running a ‘Youth Summit’ which invited teenagers to the Junction to participate ideas to the ‘Summer Intensive programme’.

Their current project is to hold a ‘Takeover’ event at the Junction on the 8th May 2010 for the youth of Cambridge. From their research, via facebook/talking to friends, they have established the layout of our day. The day will involve several workshops in various areas of the Junction building including, sound and lighting, djing, spoken word, dance, beatboxxing, digital imagery and more.

Credit to different organisations

One other constraint Simon Bates gave us, was that he wanted the logos of all the organisations that have been involved in getting the the money for the project and loaning of equipment, to give them some credit to helping the project go so well.

Simon gave us 8 logos he wanted put in, but didn't have any preference as to how he wanted them displayed. these are the logos :

This is The Junctions logo, being the main organisation and our client, they obviously needed to be credited 

These two logos are for CRC and Parkside Federation, they are the other 2 organisations in the cambridge diploma consortium and supplied us with equipment.

 

Skill Set and Arts Council England are the two organisations that funded the project

Council for learning outside the classroom is an organisation Simon is involved with that encourage and assist non classroom based educational projects

LongRoad and Cram are the two logos that credit us and our college 

My Role in the project

Because in this project we have been working in small groups we had the chance to either divide up the roles and work one role individually to contribute to the team or work as a solid unit. For filming this decision was made for us as one person from each group filmed so that every group had a tape of footage that they knew fairly well because we knew the amount of footage was going to be quite difficult to deal with.

When it came to editing we decided to do it together this meant we were able to edit solidly for the 3 hour lessons we had, we would edit together for an hour and a half, then loz would take a brake and eat while i carried on, when he got back i would take a brake. this meant we knew what each other was doing and where they were up too but also kept our productivity up to a high level

I was the only person in the class to attend every part of the project, i filmed the Samba work shop, Fiver sound check and Fiver event and i went to Bournemouth. I genuinely think that our new promo is the best out of the class and i think this is because i was at all of the key events in the project. Because i filmed, i knew what sort of footage we had and could often go straight to a clip i wanted off my tae because i could remember how far into the tape it was. Being at Bournemouth gave the same sort of advantage when it came to editing the second time, i could remember what she had said and edit accordingly.

I also kept log of the key things on here whilst researching and doing other practical work

The new promo video

Sam,Loz & Ash Final Junction Promo from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

I was already fairly unhappy with our promo video and felt it was no where near the standard we were able to achieve and that a lot of work would be needed to have been done to make it into something i would be happy to hand over to our client.  After the trip to Bournemouth, i was even more sure of this. That it had its good moment, but all in all was fairly worthless. Between us, Loz and I decided that with what we had learnt at Bournemouth, we would be better of starting again. So we did. We sat down at the start of the next lesson after Bournemouth with Ash and made a plan. 

We agreed that we needed more structure so went for simple is best technique, we would have a start (opening montage of ques and setting up) a middle (questions and answers and general info about the Fiver) and an end (an exit montage with bands coming off stage and sound bites of them saying how good it was). We also planned the titles better as well, we decided to have 3 questions come up on the same screen, one in each corner then in the 4th corner it would say Apply to Junction Fiver! Then cut to another montage and back into the same style of titles again, but a statement in each of the 3 corners like "Get Paid" etc etc and then "Apply to the Junction Fiver" again.

The plan made our productivity far more efficient and we worked much faster. We also used a lot of new shortcuts and adopted a generally new editing style. When it came to editing the end section we decided that the bands coming off stage looked a bit tacky and slightly ruined the slickness of the video, so between us we chose to leave them out and end on the second screen of information and fade from black to white with Gary's contact information and all of the crediting logos on the final screen so it stays up long enough for people to make note of it, unlike last time when you could barely even read the contact info last time.