Opening Sequence Drafts
First Draft
Our feedback came back quite positive for a first draft, but did suggest a few points that could be improved upon. Although our sequence was quite short, our audience felt as if the pace was too slow throughout when compared with the soundtrack. They also said that the way some of the doodles appeared on screen was too clustered and sometimes didn't stand out as much as we would've wanted.
As we had also pointed out these flaws ourselves, we decided to take our feedback into account and make these corrections.
Changes
In response to our feedback, we created a faster pace throughout by editing the clips, removing any unnecessary parts and undercranking parts of clips such as the introductory scene. Also as an attempt to quicken the pace, we added zoom techniques to every intrductory scene and a reversed iris round transition to a black screen to end the sequence. We also decided that removing the lyrics from our soundtrack and using only the instrumental chorus created a faster pace and sounded much more upbeat, which seemed more suitable when connecting to our target audience. We also found that staggering the entrances of our doodles slighty and vaguely increasing the glow around them created a solution to our previous issue of seeming clustered and not standing out. As an extra development, we also decided to apply colour and brightness corrections to our clips in order to make them seem brighter and make the colours bolder so that our sequence stood out more and seemed more appealing to our target audience. by making these changes we could instantly see an improvement, making our opening sequence seem more effective in regards to professionalism and the successfulness of meeting our brief at a high standard.
Second Draft
After making our improvements, we produced a second draft to gain feedback upon. Once again this came back very positive but did offer a few insights which we then took into account. Our initial casting choice for our athlete seemed to challenge the normal stereotype appearing as a 'nice, preppy kind of guy', and although this came across to our older audiences, our target audience feedback suggested that he seemed to not fit in and 'felt out of place', which is not what we had originally intended. The character names and doodles also seemed to need a bit more emphasis as they still didn't fully stand out enough to focus our audience's attention.
Changes
This feedback allowed us to develop our own insight into our work and resulted in several changes. Our main change was the recasting of our 'sporty' character, who we decided should embrace the stereotype expected of the character rather than challenge it, which also led to the change of location from the sports hall to the ball court just outside the gym above the sports hall, emphasising this stereotype in a way that can easily be identified by our target audience. In response to the names and doodles not standing out as intended, we dramatically increased the glow, stroke and drop shadow on each item which made a vast difference and produced a bolder, more visual effect within our product. This was then reinforced by further changes in the staggering of the doodles, creating a much smoother experience throughout. As a method of linking our sequence to our soundtrack further, we edited the sequence to match certain transitions and movements to that mirrored within the beat of the instrumental track, such as the addition of credits straight on a strong beat in the closing scene and under/overcranking certain parts of clips to increase the pace of the sequence. Also in an attempt to regain focus and create interest, we added a flare to our title in the closing scene which redirects the attention to the title to stop the doodles distracting from the main focus, also adding a fun aspect of special effects which would be appreciated by our target audience.
Final Draft
In the feedback for our final draft, our responses were extremely positive and suggested that our work was of a high quality and showed a professional standard which would be expected within real media texts. We asked whether they enjoyed our opening sequence and whether they would reccomend this to a friend/family member/colleague/etc. and found that our product was highly enjoyed and would be highly reccomended, which suggested that our product was successful. When asked if there was any aspect of the sequence they didn't like or would make improvements on, our feedback showed that no improvements could be suggested which led to the finalisation of our opening sequence.