Research and Planning - Prompt Questions

1. How did your research into genre contribute to your production work?

Four our AS project we made the opening sequence of a film. In our groups we got to choose which genre we wanted to produce an opening sequence for. We all seemed keen on the horror genre, and had several ideas from a very early stage.

In terms of research for our horror genre, we made a questionnaire to find out key aspects and features of a horror film. We also watched the openings of several horror films including ‘The Ring’, ‘The Unborn’ and ‘Saw’ to develop the research of our genre further.

We used our research when it came to noting down our initial ideas, and made sure our research and planning was kept consistent throughout the production process. This helped our AS production to run a lot more smoothly as we all had a clear idea in mind.

When it came to our A2 project, we had to do a lot more in depth research for our genre, depending on the track we’d chosen. We had picked the song ‘Heartbreaker’ by the artists Pink, which came under the genre of pop-rock.

Some of our research included watching other music videos by pop-rock artists such as Maroon 5 and Miley Cyrus. We also watched a handful of other music videos by Pink and took notes on the conventions which often appear in pop-rock videos, according to Goodwin’s theory. We typed the words ‘pop-rock’ into several search engines including Google, Ask and Wikipedia to broaden our knowledge of the music genre we had chosen.

I felt as though our research for both projects contributed greatly into our production work, whether it was a questionnaire, watching horror film openings or analysing music videos within our chosen genre.

2. How did your research into audience contribute to you production work?

For our AS project we created a questionnaire which we gave to friends and family in order to find out what they thought typical conventions of a horror film were. We all found the questionnaire very useful in the planning stages, as it enabled us to include certain conventions such as using a ‘spooky’ location like the woods, using props such as face paint to portray a ghost and also using scary music in the background, which would clearly portray our opening sequence from the horror genre.

For our music video project we didn’t create a questionnaire as we found it quite easy to see what an audience looks for in a pop-rock music video. The conventions were quite obvious and we ensured we’d use at least 2 typical conventions within our music video. A few of the conventions we included were bright girly make-up to emphasise the fact that the artist is female and various locations and specials effects such as slow motion and black and white to show that some of the events occurred in the past. We felt the conventions such as bright girly make-up and facial expressions whilst lip syncing were a couple of the more obvious conventions used in pop-rock music videos.

3. What pre-production planning techniques did you employ (scripting, storyboarding, shot-lists etc)? How effective was your planning – how did it help you in the production phase?

For both projects we used a couple of pre-production planning techniques to make the production element easier. We created a storyboard for both projects including rough sketches and annotations. We also created a shot-list which shots we wished to include to represent variation. Our planning was effective as it made the production element much easier as we all had a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve. For our AS project we had clear ideas from the beginning that we wanted to film our opening sequence in a spooky looking woods, and for A2, we also knew from the start that we wished to film our music video in several different locations to show variation. Another example is the music. For AS we had to find and/or make our own music to accompany our opening sequence, for this we used Garage Band, whereas in A2 we chose the song ourselves from a list of 8 songs fitting into different genres so we didn’t have to adapt the song itself in anyway.

4. What did you learn from planning your first production that helped you to improve your planning for the second?

Looking back and watching our first media production and comparing it with our second media production, I personally can see a vast improvement! We learnt a lot as a group throughout both projects however, from planning our first production and noticing the ease of filming, we ensured to plan in much more depth for our second production as it would help us even more; especially when it came to editing. Although our second production didn’t always go as smoothly as we’d imagined, we felt much more confident in what we were doing second time around.

5. How did you use audience feedback to influence your production work while it was in progress?

During the process of our first production we didn’t receive any feedback

from the audience therefore we continued to produce work in the way we 

felt was best however, watching it back now, I can see several things I’d like to take out, redo or adapt. We didn’t receive feedback for this project as at the time, we didn’t realise we had to, or that we’d need it to improve our project.

The second time around was much better as we produced a pitch presentation stating our initial ideas, and our fellow classmates gave us some feedback on what they liked, disliked and what they felt we could improve on. Once we’d chosen our final idea, we produced a short rough cut as an idea of what our finished music video would look like. We also showed this to our classmates to which we received more feedback with a list of pro’s, cons and improvements. We all found the construction feedback extremely helpful and we took it on board, as we went back to our music video to edit, we changed a few things which were suggested in the feedback.