Research and planning (Q1A)

• Institutional research (titles, legal information, record labels etc.)
• Audience research (before and after)
• Logistical research (locations, costumes, actors etc.)
• Research into real media 

To get the HIGHEST grade:

• How important research and planning was
• Why was research and planning important
• What effect did research and planning have on your final work
• What problems are there with research and planning?
• What would you not have been able to do without research and planning?
• How did research and planning benefit you?

Introduction -

Research and planning played a highly significant importance in relation to my overall success for both media productions. For my foundation portfolio I produced a short film opening in the thriller genre, as for my advanced portfolio I composed a music video in the EDM (Electrical Dance Music) genre.

At the start of AS my research and planning skills were limited, however developed rapidly during the course of the year. My development ranged from analysing more than just one media platform for research to minor skills such as producing small questionnaires/ focus groups.

Key areas:

Looking at real film opening sequences/ music videos:

• For my AS product, genre research was the first step we took towards planning our film opening. We used platforms such as youtube, vimeo, netflix and IMBD in order to best help us to analyse the most appropriate setting and camera angles for our 'thriller'. The 2004 thriller hit 'The Life Of David Gale', we took largely inspiration from. The opening of the film featured an establishing shot which was an long take. The camera angles than began changing into a variety of close ups, and dolly shots thus making the opening more intense. Thus we chose to integrate these angles into our own product whilst designing the storyboard. We planned to feature a variety of close up angles to emphasise the protagonists fear, in which through research we found was a key element to the thriller genre. The close up's from'Fight club'(1999) is where we coined our key inspiration for this. We involved a vast amount of close up angles in order to elaborate to the audience the characters loneliness and isolation within the deserted location, which we found was a key convention thus research into the iconic 'Under the skin' thriller featuring Scarlett Johansson.
• However at A2 for my music video product, my research and planning techniques vastly improved. I took inspiration from the platform you tube in order to watch existing pieces from my genre and gain knowledge of the conventions from real media texts. Calvin Harris 'How deep is your love' music video, taught me the conventions in which EDM videos featured a bright colour palette in order to be perceived as vibrant to the viewers. I thus increased the saturation and colouration during the editing stages in order to fit this convention. 'The nights' by Avicii, also inspired our editing regarding the pace and continuity of our footage, since both our product and the artists music videos fitted the 'montage' category, his video inspired many aspects of own e.g. City locations, Happy characters and POV/ dolly/ panning angles. A common convention we found through existing media research was that the montage videos music would fit the beat of the clips, so if the beat were to speed up so would the pace of the clips, thus for our own product we incorporated this code, meaning we were true to the genre.

Institutional research: 

• This allowed us to understand the certain conventions of media products. For example we researched movie titles from watching previous openings to thriller movies in which we were able to understand the order of titles to furthermore make our product have an more convincing/ realistic film opening. 
• However, for my A2 product I had to go further into depth by ensuring that both my music music and ancillary products had synergy regarding the titles. I knew this was essential due to previous research regarding popular EDM artists on 'google' most of the artists tended to have  brand image/ title. Especially for my digipak I gained an understanding of layout in terms of the barcode, legal information, record label logo etc.

Mis-en-scene, costume and prop research:

• My costume ideas for AS were very basic, we took most of our inspiration from watching previous movie sequences, to analyse what the protagonist was wearing thus we chose a casual look. The most important piece of clothing was the villains glove, in which was necessary to keep the identity of the character a mystery to the audience, a common thriller convention which we analyed via other thriller products.
• For my A2 product we took costume research to a higher extent, For possible ideas I looked on popular shopping websites such as prettylittlething and missguided in order to identify the type of urban outfits were currently trending fo our target group: youth. This type of research was important since it made our protagonists look more appropriate for the type of genre video we were shooting, thus not going an unrealistic perspective. 

Audience questionnaires:

• I chose to conduct audience research for my AS by producing an paper questionnaire to hand out out and ask for my other peers to fill in. I used the questionnaires to analyse our target audience's opinions and feelings towards certain topics we were trying to counteract for example a female being our lead protagonist. Through this research we were able to gain a better understanding, and point out particular issues which may arise during shooting. 
• As much as I did involve a fair amount of audience research for my AS product I failed to questionnaire a more contrasting set of people, thus my responses could not be completely accurate due to only asking a demographic which contained similar interests and opinions due to being all within the same age group, furthermore limiting myself. At A2 I not only conducted questionnaires in which were handed to out to a much vaster demographic but also took place verbal interviews. I would commonly pitch ideas with my partner to a few peers at a time in order to demonstrate our ideas and use our Imacs to present via existing media texts the type of video we were growing our inspiration from/ intended to partially recreate. This method of research proved to be effective since it allowed my group to take notes, and even record the interviews in order to reflect in the future to analyse whilst developing and editing our product.

Storyboarding/ redrafting & Shotlist/ editing plan:

• Due to I had never done story boarding before A-level. My first storyboards at AS tended to be simple with mainly pictures, and very little shot description as well as editing information. The storyboard we had produced was clear and visible however was very basic which limited us at times regarding the angles/ shots during filming. 
• However, at A2 my skills improved massively, since I had now developed technical skills my ability to create a detailed storyboard has developed. For my A2 product I produced an animation storyboard in which was very efficient whilst in the process of shooting, thanks to digital technology we could watch our plan whilst on the go.

Prelim:

• The prelim which I produced at AS helped me to develop skills such as framing, different angles and the 180 degrees rule.
• However for our music video prelim I had the task of recreating an existing music video opening in which required me to do a lot more preparation as well as planning. We used video streaming platforms such as You-tube, to identify which type of music video genre we wanted to reenact. Thus are shot lists had to be a lot more precise at A2, in regards to our AS prelim. Furthermore, our skills expanded from only being very basic to more advanced.

Blogger:

• At AS my use of blogger, was very basic, due to only being only newly introduced to the site. I chose a basic layout, and made posts when necessary, using very little imagery.
• However at A2, I gained better use of my blogger website, by using labels in order to be organised and easily identify each section of my portfolio, as well was able to combine text, images and embedded links into my posts in order to be more creative and visually appealing.