Research and Planning Essay Question

Explain how your research and planning skills have developed over time, and how they have contributed to your media production outcome

Research and planning are very important within any production. My development over my two years in study shows a huge improvement, which is what I am going to portray throughout this essay.

We started by introducing ourselves to genre. Learning about how diverse the film industry was gave us the scope we had to work from. From thrillers to comedies and love stories to war memorabilia’s it gave us an idea of what the distinct similarities were between each film and also the differences. For instance, dear johns opening title sequence consists of a lot of exponential shots, to set the scene. Similarly, fast and furious 6 also includes exponential shots again setting the scene. These two film openings both have very different genres yet are both structured in the same way. Therefore, giving us information on how to structure our very own film opening. This research into the industry also helped us to identify between the leaders of the market, the big six. They portray how money can make a large difference within the industry. We learnt to present all o our research in tools such as slide share and PowerPoint. They meant all of our work could be clearly laid out and simple to understand.

We then looked into what a film opening includes, its stereotypes and what it must include. This gave us a great insight into defining a film opening and meant our final product would also be definable as a film opening. Practice was a key part to our research into editing. We produced a dancing animals clip where we used the distort effect to change an image and make it move. Then we moved onto the JUNO task, to replicate a film opening. This helped us to understand the camera angles needed in a film opening as well as matching effects to other shots. The prelim was our last research method and we chose to produce an action film opening. It helped us to understand how many shots we would need in our final product and also how we would portray a narrative in such a short clip in the opening. The opening titles are one of the stereotypes that make a film opening and to get the best titles possible for our production we used titles.com. This is an online tool that allowed us to match the titles to our production and genre. The research helped us make sure the titles fitted before adapting them to our film opening.

when we moved on to the music industry, instantly we put more work into relation our emotions to the industry. I looked at what music means to me and presented my favourite songs on an Emaze. This helped us establish imagery between the lyrics and visuals we created in our minds. We also listened to songs like no rest by the river to start us off with creative ideas for music videos allowing us to mentally prepare for what we would put in our final video. This research also helped us to understand the difference between each genre in the music industry. This extensive research helped us to construct how to replicate genres and identify their stereotypes. We did more research in this area as in year 12, we felt it was hard to define its narrative and purpose of our final product. In a music video, making the genre distinct and identifiable structures the whole video therefore making it professional and effective. As well as that we took influences from real life media theorists Carol Vernallis and Andrew Goodwin, they gave us an insight as to what makes a professional music video. Their work on forms and conventions gave us an in-depth plan of how to make our video diverse and skilful. This research was all similar to the type of research that we did in year 12 and therefore we chose to analyse real media products and artists. I did a 20 second breakdown of the music video wild thoughts by DJ Khalid. This meant I highlighted the specific jump cuts and shots to give us an idea of the variety of shots we needed to include. We then looked at artist analysis where we looked at how they synergised all of their products. It also helped us to understand the number of different platforms there where to promote our music video. And final our prelim task where we replicated four five seconds by Kanye west, Rhianna and Paul McCartney. This gave us an idea of how much is needed in a music video and how quick the cuts and shots are, preparing us for our final music video. All of these ideas and theories we presented through emazes, prezi’s, video presentations and blog posts as well as powerpoint and slideshare. These extra presentation tools varied our research and made it more interesting to view. Learning these software’s gave us new creative presentation techniques and overall improved our presentation of all of our platforms e.g. the website, pitch ideas, specific artist research etc. overall showing a vast improvement from year 12 to year 13.  

When it came to planning, we focused year 12 on getting all of the work done within a time limit and therefore didn’t complete each aspect to our best ability. We started of my filling our distinct and adapting our ideas to its themes. It helped us understand and know what we needed to include, like a checklist. This then developed onto a simplistic story board with a few illustrations and descriptions of each scene. Once we had each shot planned, we wrote a short shooting schedule. As these two tools were not completed in detail it meant that we struggled to get all of the shots we needed on time. This meant we had to add in reshoots and add in shots as the film opening felt as though it was missing parts. The props list kept us on track with what we needed to bring to each shoots and meant we were organised when shooting, yet again it wasn’t in a large amount of detail and therefore when looking over the shots they seem scrambled and unorganised. As well as the conventional planning for the film opening we chose to produce an elementary website with a few pictures of the film opening to promote our newly released film.

All of these factors worked well, although we improved on them in year 13 by delving into more developed blog posts and preparation tools. We used a video presentation to show the story board as it was a more detailed was that we could show what would be in the shot as well as describing what would be happening. It showed how the music video would evolve from beginning until the end. Also giving us more information for the shots that we needed to shoot when on location, making us more organised. The shooting schedule was also more detailed as we wanted to be practical and efficient, to do so we included timings, detailed descriptions of the shots and describing internal and external shots. It gave us the 100s of shots that we needed. We also developed our website knowledge by including more transitions between the pages and also including more animations and links to our other social medias. We made sure the colour themes matched our video as well as our digipak. We edited the digipak on adobe Photoshop as it made the pictures sharp and precise. Giving us the sharp professional look we were going for.

Overall, my development has shown how I have gained knowledge and skills in all of our media areas.