Digitized YouTube Channel + Video

We created our Digitized YouTube channel in order to gauge opinion of our target audience. Having considered David Gauntlett’s theory that audiences and producers ‘blur together’ in the 21st century, we felt it was important to show our band had exploited the technology and networking available to us in order to create our video and interact with people. As pioneers of the digital age, its easy to neglect the fact that technology is enhancing our music sharing experience beyond what was originally deemed possible,  so we thought we’d demonstrate our recognition of this by using a YouTube channel to share videos.

Our YouTube channel for Digitized (with proof of video upload!)

Half way through the editing process we uploaded a mini edit version of our video to show what we had done so far. We posted the video link on our individual FaceBook and Twitter sites to encourage people to take a look and leave feedback, which we received openly. We acknowledged that there would be a range of views on whether the video itself was coherent or looked professional, so we were prepared to garner criticism.

'Pogo' Teaser Video - Digitized

We had our own ideas of what needed to be improved before making it public online, but we felt it was just as important for our demographic to voice their opinion as it’s a video that reflects them and their way of life.

We were pleased that when feedback was first received a lot of it was positive. We were told it ‘had good camera shots to portray being drunk’, ‘effective locations’ and ‘good story-lines’ and that gave us confidence that we were heading in the right direction in terms of delivering a relatable video to our audience. We weren’t completely immune from constructive criticism though, which was good because this was the point of this process anyway, and a number of comments focussed on how it fit together alongside the song.

A few people felt that although the video showed a drunken night out, it didn’t necessarily tie in perfectly with the song itself. One particular comment explained ‘the video could have accompanied any number of different songs, it maybe needs to relate more to ‘Pogo”. When watching the video back through again afterwards, we could see where they were coming from and realised we needed to experiment with it to ensure that in future it does fit with the song. I proposed that we add shots of someone miming to certain words to link the audio and visuals together, something Scott and Cathy agreed would help. When we next went out to film other elements of the video that we hadn’t already put together, we went and re-filmed one part of the video so the shots included miming. We knew that just one sequence of miming wouldn’t improve the coherency of the video, so we found a location where another mime could be filmed with another character. By having at least two mimes it didn’t look like we panicked and at the last minute added one in, it looks deliberate and part of the video.

I still felt it was lacking in something and after consulting with Scott in particular, we decided we would try and implement some text at certain points of the video. We felt the stand out lyrics in the song are ‘yeah’, ‘wah-ohh’ – they are memorable words and really capture the spirit of a ‘drunken Friday night out’ – so we tried to put them in to text when they are sung over the video. We decided to use a font that I had used in my ‘Digitized’ website, as it maintained a coherency between the entire media package I was creating (music video, website, CD cover). We decided to use the text at two separate points in the video and added the lyrics ‘there’s something in the air’ before it, to emphasise our understanding of it’s effect.

Other than that a sound issue was brought to our attention, which was easily rectified as we just needed to cut all audio from our recordings – something we thought we’d already done. Aside from these particular highlighted improvements, nothing else major was needed, except to carry on the final part of the editing process in the same vain. We continued to do so and were finally in a position to upload our finished video. Barring any obvious deficiencies that our audience may inform us of, no further editing is required and it is available to access on our YouTube page.

'Pogo' - Digitized (Official Video)

[UPDATE (22/12/12): Unfortunately we have encountered problems in that EMI have blocked both videos from being accessed on 'copyright grounds', even though we wrote disclaimers in the video descriptions. They were available online for around a week before they were taken down. The links above are the web addresses for the videos but as you will discover they will take you to YouTube where it will say they have been blocked.]