Focus groups: what and why?

A focus group is a small, but demographically diverse group of people whose reactions are studied especially in market research about a new product or something else to determine the reactions that can be expected from a larger population.
Focus groups give an understanding of what your consumers think about the product before the mass production has started.
Now we can still make some adjustments in order to improve the product. Any adjustments now will not cost a lot of money and will potentially increase sales. That's why it is better to do it now.
To prepare for the digipak feedback it is important to prepare not leading questions. Print copies of the album cover to give it to focus group. This way participants of the focus group will actually see the products in their hands and it would be easier to reflect on them.
When getting the feedback for the website it is important that the website should be uploaded and all links actually should work. It is important for audience what the product is, not how it is going to look like.
When getting a music video feedback, he video should be shown on the big screen. Questions should also be very well prepared.
The website promotes the digipak and digipak promotes video clip. Also, it is important to find out if website and digipak represent the genre of music video. That's why it is better to do it in that order: website, digipak, music video.
To sum up:
Prepare everything in advance. Record the feedback.
Do not ask leading questions. Do not argue with the participants of focus group.
Record it on video. It is better to put the camera behind the group so people will be more confident to talk.

Constructing Website

Here are the screenshots of how Yafei Xiao has started to do our website:

 

Here are some screenshots of how I started to change our website:

Constructing Digipak

Here are pictures of how our digipak was constructed by Dora Martynyuk:

 

And this is our first draft of digipak:

First Draft of the Music Video

We already started editing our video and here is a performance cut that we have made:

Shooting day: Behind the scene video

Here is a behind the scene video of our shooting day which shows how it went in 1 minute:

Evaluation of the shooting day

Yesterday we finally had our shooting day, and in this blog, I will write how was it.
The day before that, we went to the studio to set everything up. We looked at all elements of the 3 elements and decided that the third one is the most complicated in the building, comparing to others. That's why we started with that one as we had more time that day rather than on actual shooting day. For that element, we hanged a white curtain to the ceiling and put a white blanket on the floor. On that day we also checked all our costumes and talked once more with our cast about what do we expect from them.
When I woke up on the next day, I felt quite confident as we were all set up and ready. We started to shoot almost straightaway because the set was ready and actors came at the time. Before the shoot, we just needed to put on Tia nude make-up and the right costume.
We started shooting with the third element when Tia was inside white curtains. Everything looked very good, how we were expecting it. We did close-up and wide shots of her alone. For this element, my role was to play playback. Then we asked our male actor Max to join her in the curtains. At first, our actors were shy, and we even thought that the element won't work. However, after a few tries, we got several very nice shots that we could definitely later use. For this element, we also did one close-up and one wide shot.
Then we moved on to the first element which is a white background and red couch. Our background was infinity roll which worked perfectly. The couch was also how we were expecting it - in Victorian style. Our artist Tia also changed to a white dress, beige high-hills and put red lipstick on. We also gave her jewellery we wanted her to wear and changed it for all elements as in our research we saw that almost all pop artists have jewellery on. Here, for all poses she had, we shot three type of shots: wide, mid, close. We also did some modelling shots like her dancing or just laying on the couch. In this element, I tried myself as a cameraman and I think I coped well with my job. This element went very smooth and we got very nice shots.
The second set for that element was red background and white couch. The red infinity roll was very nice in colour and we made a final choice for the dress according to it. However, the couch that we had had a hole that didn't look good on the camera. To solve that problem we find a white material and covered one part of a couch with it. Otherwise, everything worked very well and we also shot for each poses three shots: wide, mid and close and then did some model shots. In this scene, I also was a cameraman for many shots as I enjoyed shooting it and it worked for whole my group.

The last element was the dancers surrounded by light bulbs. We left the red infinity roll from the previous element and added light bulbs by hanging them from the ceiling. The dancers were rehearsing dances for all this time so they were pretty ready by the time we needed them. For this element, I was a director so I was just supervising the whole process and giving commands to dancers and the cameraman. This element was harder to shoot as dancers were moving a lot and the red background was not very wide. So we needed to make sure that the borders are not seen in the shot. We shooted three dances for each chorus. For each dance, we also made shots of different width. When we finished with the dancers, we also took some shots of light bulbs.
Overall, our shooting day went quite well and everything went how we were expecting it to go. All the issues we had was easy to solve and it just made that day even more interesting.

Draft Design of our website

Here is a rough draft of the website I want to create for our artist: