Over the last two years of this media course I have made improvements in research and planning which will seriously impact the final productions of future projects. I improved on aspects such as boarding, risk assessments and research. For my AS project, I created a film opening for a sports drama about an old man reflecting on his career as an international football player. For my A2 project I created a music video for a pop song, we created star profiles for a band called Avenue.
To create Cohen, we used storyboarding to create a shot by shot plan of what the film opening was going to look like. We felt like this plan was very rough as many of the shots we were planning to get depending on the environment we were filming in which was not completely controlled by my group. For example, we know we wanted to get close-ups of boots, water bottles and people talking etc however, we weren’t sure if everyone was going to have the right equipment because some peoples football boots didn’t look old enough and the scene was supposed to be a flash back. We were not precise enough in our editing. On the other hand, my A level production was a lot more precise in terms of storyboarding and general planning also. We could write down our ideas about what we wanted to do to pair with the lyrics on a lyrics sheet. Adding this step into the process before story boarding gave us a much better idea of the shots we would get. An example of good planning was taking the lyrics of the song “spreadsheet files and coffee pouring” and incorporate it in an action sequence. As the lyrics are sung two band members come into the shot, one with spreadsheet files and the other with coffee. These links to the lyrics were consistent throughout the production and it was due to the planning involved. This planning was an improvement because it was much more detailed in its use of props and actors.
Another way we improved on the research and planning over the two years of the course was using a steele-o-matic. This is both a planning and research task where you take shots and ideas from productions of a similar genre and compile them into a video. We did not use a steele-o-matic when making Cohen, I feel as though if we use this process then there may have been more conventions of the genre in the film opening. We did use this process to create our music video and we found it was very helpful. For example, we knew we wanted to use smoke bombs in our production but couldn’t work out which shots would make their usage most effective. The steele-o-matic showed us diverse ways we could film it.
In terms of research, for our film opening we recorded all the editing which occurred in film openings of the same genre. This included when title appeared, shot lengths, shot types ect. Film openings are very different to music videos however we still used this process. However, to improve we thought about why they had used the editing techniques and the meanings behind them. We looked at a B.O.B music video and he appeared in the bottom corners of the shots, we took this to mean that the topic he was singing about was more important than himself. This research made us take a lot more care in choosing each shot when we moved into the planning stages. The thought process was improved through this process.
In conclusion, the planning and research was improved in this process through new techniques such as the steele-o-matic and through enlightened thought processes. The main improvement was in the story boarding which had more detail due to more preparation.
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