Research and Planning
When looking back at my Year 12 AS Media coursework I can clearly see now that there is room for improvement. Our task as a group was to create a film opening. We had the freedom to do whatever we pleased. After a few lessons of drafting ideas we finally made the decision of using the genre horror for our opening. All three members of our group wrote a name of the film down that we thought would look good. We sat down and discussed which we liked better, we all came to the conclusion that we loved “She Told Me To”. This is because we thought that it sounded like a horror film as it gave you the creeps but also says exactly what the film was about – a possessed doll which controls the vulnerable woman. This method was probably not the best as we only took on board three girl’s opinions rather than boys and other ages. We believed that the best and most probably the easiest target audience were teenagers. This is because we ourselves are teenagers therefore we could relate to the target audience and our likes and dislikes were similar the rest of the audiences. Unfortunately again this was all the planning that we did for our choice of target audience – our opinions. When planning my target audience this year in A2 for creating a music video, I will make up a questionnaire and ask my peers and family what they feel would be best the target audience and name of artist. This is so that I get different opinions from a range of ages. The next part that we planned was the storyboard. This was so that we could get an idea for the shots and the timings. When we made the storyboard, we felt at the time that it wouldn't really help us therefore we didn't really make much of an effort. We estimated the time slots and the camera angles. When we came to filming we really relied on the storyboard but unfortunately we couldn't as it was not detailed enough. This is definitely something that I will work on in this next coursework as I feel that it is extremely vital to the task. I will ensure that the storyboard is very detailed and will tell us exactly what needs to be in each shot and how this will be done. The next part of our research which we completed was general research for our video. This consisted of who would be best to play our characters, what would they wear, what were their names, make up, costumes etc. We started our research of who would be the best actors in our video. The way we decided to do this was by looking at our friends, we thought this would be the easiest way as we know exactly how our friends act and mostly when they are free to film. We looked at 3 different girls in our friendship group, 2 being from our media class. This immediately had a positive effect as we thought that it would probably be easier to pick someone who also does media as they would understand the technical terms and would be free the same time as us. After carefully looking we finally chose Poppy for many reasons. We eliminated the boys in the same way but unfortunately neither of them was in media. We finally chose Dave. We then started research for the font of our title. We typed into a scary font generator the name of our title. It produced lots of different fonts; we chose our favourite ones and asked our class members which was their favourite also. Something which we could improve on next time would be to ask more people to get an average answer. Next we researched previous production logos from other horror films. This helped us to understand the common connection between them all. As a group we started to draft ideas of our logo. Again we only went with our own opinions not everyone else’s; this is definitely our main priority to concentrate on this task. I felt as a group we managed our research and planning time well as we started this all straight away and finished this quite quickly. I will make sure that I continue to manage my time well in this year’s task to hopefully gain a better grade.
When looking back at my Year 12 AS Media coursework I can clearly see now that there is room for improvement. Our task as a group was to create a film opening. We had the freedom to do whatever we pleased. After a few lessons of drafting ideas we finally made the decision of using the genre horror for our opening. All three members of our group wrote a name of the film down that we thought would look good. We sat down and discussed which we liked better, we all came to the conclusion that we loved “She Told Me To”. This is because we thought that it sounded like a horror film as it gave you the creeps but also says exactly what the film was about – a possessed doll which controls the vulnerable woman. This method was probably not the best as we only took on board three girl’s opinions rather than boys and other ages. We believed that the best and most probably the easiest target audience were teenagers. This is because we ourselves are teenagers therefore we could relate to the target audience and our likes and dislikes were similar the rest of the audiences. Unfortunately again this was all the planning that we did for our choice of target audience – our opinions. When planning my target audience this year in A2 for creating a music video, I will make up a questionnaire and ask my peers and family what they feel would be best the target audience and name of artist. This is so that I get different opinions from a range of ages. The next part that we planned was the storyboard. This was so that we could get an idea for the shots and the timings. When we made the storyboard, we felt at the time that it wouldn't really help us therefore we didn't really make much of an effort. We estimated the time slots and the camera angles. When we came to filming we really relied on the storyboard but unfortunately we couldn't as it was not detailed enough. This is definitely something that I will work on in this next coursework as I feel that it is extremely vital to the task. I will ensure that the storyboard is very detailed and will tell us exactly what needs to be in each shot and how this will be done. The next part of our research which we completed was general research for our video. This consisted of who would be best to play our characters, what would they wear, what were their names, make up, costumes etc. We started our research of who would be the best actors in our video. The way we decided to do this was by looking at our friends, we thought this would be the easiest way as we know exactly how our friends act and mostly when they are free to film. We looked at 3 different girls in our friendship group, 2 being from our media class. This immediately had a positive effect as we thought that it would probably be easier to pick someone who also does media as they would understand the technical terms and would be free the same time as us. After carefully looking we finally chose Poppy for many reasons. We eliminated the boys in the same way but unfortunately neither of them was in media. We finally chose Dave. We then started research for the font of our title. We typed into a scary font generator the name of our title. It produced lots of different fonts; we chose our favourite ones and asked our class members which was their favourite also. Something which we could improve on next time would be to ask more people to get an average answer. Next we researched previous production logos from other horror films. This helped us to understand the common connection between them all. As a group we started to draft ideas of our logo. Again we only went with our own opinions not everyone else’s; this is definitely our main priority to concentrate on this task. I felt as a group we managed our research and planning time well as we started this all straight away and finished this quite quickly. I will make sure that I continue to manage my time well in this year’s task to hopefully gain a better grade.
Following the conventions of real
media texts
As a group we
ensured that our film opening followed the conventions of a horror film. We
briefly knew what the conventions of a horror film were but not everything
therefore we needed to research into them more. We watched the start of a few
horror films like ours for example The Possession and Sinister and we found
that all the films started in the same way. The opening shot was an
establishing shot which showed the setting therefore this is what we will do in
our opening film. The films all generally started with a song in the background
which was quite creepy so as before we used this again to ensure we kept all
the conventions of horror film. We found a creepy song about a doll on YouTube
which we used as our backing song which worked well as it was relevant to our
film. The music was slow paced and gradually got faster which was the same as
ours. Every film opening - not just horror films, have their production logos
at the beginning of the film. To keep the conventions the same we had to do
this as well. We related the logo to horror so that people knew what genre of
film they were watching. There isn’t lots of conventions of a horror film
opening therefore we had to make sure that we followed the ones that there are
so people would be intrigued. In my A2 course work I will ensure that I will
follow all conventions and hopefully follow them better this time so that I
will attract more audiences.
Creativity and Originality
When I look
back on how our group did to produce a film opening, I feel that we took on board
all of the conventions but still made it personal to ourselves. This was so
that our video would be unique and different than other peoples. We decided to
use footage of a family member who was a child therefore it was original to us
and this was personal footage. In between these shots we flashed up images of a
doll, this took our own spin on the film. We used various shots from
establishing shots to handheld shots. This mixed the shots up a bit so that
they didn’t get so repetitive. For our A2 coursework I hope to keep the
creativity and originality as I feel this is the most important part. This will
intrigue the audience and keep them entertained throughout.
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