Question 1: Section A: Research and planning (practice essay)

Research & Planning - how your skills have progressed and how they helped you in your productions

Research and planning have played a huge role in all of my production work so far and hence my skills in research and planning have developed massively.  My research and planning have made my production work develop in terms of quality. 

At AS we used questionnaires to make sure we had an appropriate set of questions to ask fellow students and teachers what they thought of our film opening and get valuable feedback to improve.

At A2 we improved our use of questionnaires by devising a four page written questionnaire to get feedback for our music video. This included questions to find out information such as how people watch music videos, and how they enjoyed our music video/ what could be improved. We also had a one page questionnaire online so that the computer could generate a solid conclusion of feedback for us – all of this aided the improvement of our A2 music video.

At AS we used focus groups to assemble a group of people to participate in a discussion about our film opening before it was launched and to provide feedback. This proved to be useful as it was a smaller group of people who came to a screening of our film opening and were more of our target audience (teenagers interested in action and sci-fi)

At A2 we didn’t use focus groups as much as we found that the majority of students in our class were our target audience so there was no need to narrow it down – we were still able to get appropriate and useful feedback to improve our final product.

At AS we examined real opening sequences such as Catch Me If You Can and Iron Man in order to see how action/sci-fi film openings use font and colour to have effective title sequences. Also, in order to see how they use forms and conventions and other factors such as mise on scene to have a successful film opening.

At A2 we improved our research / analysis of real texts by thoroughly analysing multiple music videos of any genre that related to the theorists we were using. We then furthered this by analysing music videos of a specific genre once we had chosen our particular genre. This meant looking at music videos of the genre ‘indie’ – such as Lana Del Rey’s music video for ‘video game.’ This then enabled us to look at similar album cover genres and improved our research from AS level.

At AS we used storyboards for planning every single shot we wanted to film in our film opening. This meant working out how long the shot would be for, what type of shot we wanted to use (e.g. close up) and where the shot would be filmed. The storyboard was followed closely in order to get a successful film opening.

At A2 we improved our use of storyboards by matching the shots to a lyric timeline. We were able to plan our shots even more thoroughly than at AS level as we planned what would be filmed/performed for every single word of the song and every single instrumental. We closely followed our storyboard as this was a successful way of filming all the shots we needed and then were able to narrow this down when editing and add successful effects.

At AS we completed prelim tasks to practice how it would be to film and edit a film opening sequence. We were assigned a random genre (action) and from this were able to find out where everyone’s strengths were to put this into action for the real film opening. For example, someone who might not have been so good at editing was a strong performer, and someone who wasn’t a strong performer was good at doing the ‘paper-work’ side of things. The prelim task was also an insight into how much fun the real thing would be but also how much hard work and effort we each would need to give.

At A2 we improved the way we used the prelim task by having a more ‘heads on’ approach to it. We were able to thoroughly plan a storyboard and copy exactly a music video of our choice. This was a difficult task, as we had to follow each shot carefully and closely. The music video we chose had advanced effects, which helped us learn more advanced editing skills at A2 level. This prelim task gave us an insight into how much more difficult this task would be then at AS level, and how much more focus we would need to successfully complete this task.

Research and planning skills have changed me from a producer of basic media texts, into a producer of complex quality media texts.  Research and planning skills are essential to making someone a better, more creative producer of media.