Post- Pitch Feedback

Having completed our pitch, we were given back the anonymous forms that the class had been given to review our video ideas. This has been helpful in aiding our understanding of how we can improve.

The class responded well to our audience research, noting that it was "realistic" and "well researched", and, commenting on the originality of the idea, noted it was "different" and "entropic", a response Beth and me are very pleased with, having set out to overthrow redundant themes and aim towards something very quirky and interesting in its originality. However, there was a comment that suggested it was similar to Mumford and Sons. This is an opinion that I disagree with quite strongly, though I can understand where similarities lie in terms of mise-en-scene (the costumes and settings) perhaps, though this aspect is unavoidable - we still need to retain some of the redundant characteristics we pinpointed in our music video research to ensure that our video can indeed be recognised as a video for folk music.

Naturally, with the setting and concepts included in our music people, health and safety was questioned a lot. When asked about how achievable they thought the music video would be, most of the class expressed doubts about the "hanged people" we wanted to include in the darker scenes, asking how we would manage it. This was, however, already a point which we had carefully considered: we will not have a rope directly connecting a person to a tree. The rope which hangs from the tree and the rope that circles the characters' necks will be two different entities, cancelling out all risk of accidental injury in this respect. The shots of the hanged people will not show the full body at the same time. Rather, if we want shots of the upper half of the body, the actor can stand on a chair, or even on the floor. If we want shots of feet, we will find a low branch and get the actor to sit and dangle their feet in the air. Of course, climbing the trees is also potentially dangerous, and we will be mindful in picking appropriate trees with branches low enough to present little danger of falling and sustaining serious injury. In the woods, we must also be careful of tripping hazards such as roots and sticks, and be sure to keep warm. All we really need now to keep in our considerations is the weather - filming outdoors with unpredictable weather could seriously harm our shooting time scale if the weather makes a turn for the worse, and we'll have to be mindful of this.

A few people commented on the lighting. If we're in woodlands, the possibilities are that the shots will be much darker than intended. As we can't really take studio lighting into the woods, we will be careful to choose areas that are well lit and edit the shots in post production to rectify brightness and contrast issues.

Overall, almost everyone everyone agreed that it sounded like a realistic and exciting idea.