Research and Planning Essay 1A

I created two pieces of texts in my coursework during my AS and A level. For my AS I created a film opening with the genre of my choice, I created an action comedy named “Not So Die Hard” about  a group of teens robbing a bank. In my A level coursework, I created a music video, I chose to do an alternative song and called it “Drugs” in my music video I wanted to make it very fun and make it seem as though there is nothing better than having fun with friends, in my music video I wanted him to seem different  so therefore we did a "trippy" editing with extreme camera angles.

For AS I did some research for the film opening, by looking at premade films and also music videos. The music video for ‘ central intelligence ’ really was a huge influence for our film opening. This is because it was similar to what we wanted in our film opening. 

For our A2 production I feel as though our research was a lot more thorough and we managed to do a lot more in-depth research into how we wanted our music video to look and get inspirations from premade videos. We especially liked the music video by ASAP MOB ‘Lamborghini high’, and we were inspired by the visual effects , as well as the fun locations.

In both our AS and A2 coursework we did research into the target audience, however there was a large amount more research done in A2. In AS we looked online to see statistics and people’s views on what the target audience would want to see. However, in A2 we actually went out ourselves and asked our target audience questions, by hand. This really helped when it came to our music video because we could know exactly what our target audience would want to see.

In the planning we did a shooting schedule for both AS and A2, this enabled us to be able to know all of the shots which we needed when we would go out to film. We have noticed from A2 compared to AS that there was a lot more shots required for our music video rather than film opening, where there could be long shots, filling up a lot of time. We also noticed this in our storyboards, because the film opening only used up about 25 shots when making the storyboard, whereas the music video took a lot more. This is because in the music video we needed much faster cut changes to fit in with the music and the beat.

The stealomatic was a very important part of the planning when making the music video. This helped us to form all of our ideas, through the research and put them into one video. For example, we got the pieces we liked from  ASAP MOB  shaka say nothing and put the best bits into one long video, so we were able to take inspirations from these parts when filming and editing.

When we were creating the presentations for our evaluation and also the ideas for our music video and film opening we also had to do a small amount of research in how to use the presentation programs as a lot of them were new to us. In AS we mainly just used PowerPoint, however in A2 we used a lot more different presentation methods such as Emaze and prezi  to really improve our presentation skills, therefore research on using these applications was very important so that the presentations looked successful.