Essay Reviewing Coursework

Research and Planning

Research and planning was a critical part of my coursework last year. It took a lot of looking into things to actually plan where we were going to make our film opening, how it was going to be filmed and what it was going to be about. An example of how  important our research and planning was when we were looking for a location, which was very tricky. We planned to make our film genre to be horror so picking the location was a very hard challenge, it had to have a freaky presence otherwise the film would look a bit pointless being a horror. We chose Tommy's house in Doddinghurst, this was because the road he lives down is very dark and lighting was key to make our film scary. He had an adjustable brightness light in his front room which also helped a lot as the scarier the film got the more we could play around with the lights seeing if our film was scary or not.

Personally I think their were many positives of research and planning for our group but there were also quite a few flaws. We spent too much time worrying about the location when we could of had one set in five minutes, a lot of lessons were spent looking at different places to film and quite a few of these weren't really relevant. One of  the strengths of our research and planning was that we had everything planned out well, the outfits, masks and how it was going to be filmed was planned out well.

In A2 I think I will plan everything a lot better and look more into detail what makes a good music video. I realised when doing AS level that research and planning makes the whole end product completely different depending on how much effort you make at the beginning when looking into the music video.


Following Conventions Of Real Media Text

We followed real media text in many different ways, we looked at several different film openings from horror films and also looked at horror stories online to gain a good storyline for our end product. Because we knew we were going to be making our opening in Tommy's house we thought it would be useful to look at openings to horror films that were set in a house, Paranormal Activity and Friday the 13th were good openings to use. We looked at the way these films used lighting and how the acting was done and followed these conventions throughout our film. We looked at how other films used Mise en scene for our film because there are many conventions involved that we had to consider in our film. Lighting was the main convention that we needed to follow because we met a person who came into our class that was talking to us about horror film making and he explained that horror films will only be well made if the lighting is good, depending on how it is used for certain parts, initially we thought using strobe lights to add a weirdness to the film would be good but then we realised it would be a struggle to gain a strobe light. The decision to film at Tommy's house was a good one because as I said earlier he has adjustable lights and he lives down a dark road which made it easier to add darkness when we needed to. The camera shots that other products  use was also helpful to us when making our film, we used a simple Panasonic video camera so the quality wasn't amazing but we did the best we could with it.

Positives of following real media text was that it helped us to show the audience some tension within our film but there were parts where we could of followed them a bit more. Our film wasn't scary at all in some parts that were meant to be scary and this made everything seem a bit silly.

In A2 I am going to watch many music videos before I start filming my end product and whilst it is being filmed I will compare it to big music videos and other students work also to see where about's I can make improvements or if I have done well which will give me confidence. Also I think I need to be more confident in my work as last year I think as a group we spent too much time saying our own work wasn't good enough when it might have been good.

Creativity/Originality

Our final product was very creative but it was also quite original. Over previous years many AS level students have chose to film their horror movies in forests and dark areas because they found that filming them in houses was too hard to make scary so we decided to go against the typical idea of filming in somewhere different. The originality of our film opening was that we tried to keep it similar to how many famous films in houses were filmed, so it was a bit similar and typical of a film made in a  house. The idea with the lighting that was spoken about earlier on was creative as we could judge how bright or how dim to have them for certain parts of the opening but it definitely lacked creativity. In AS media I also used very stereotypical programs to present my work such as Microsoft Powerpoint and Microsoft word, I need to be more creative and use programmes that previous students haven't used before and this will give me an edge.

In A2 I think we will try to keep our music video original in parts as sometimes you can't really beat tradition but if we put our own edge on our music video I think it will help to gain a better grade. Also I will use different programmes other than prezzi and Microsoft programmes, I will use programmes online that previous students haven't used so that my blog has its own unique twist.