RESEARCH & PLANNING - Research and Planning

In preparation for developing our media piece, we had conducted various forms of research (both primary and secondary) in attempts to give us insight into consumer views and opinions. This included researching and analysing various openings to films and assessing their effect that they had upon the audience.

Throughout the planning stages, we had created a mindmap detailing various features and ideas we had for our film. Such details gave information on shot choices, music and costumes to create a quick mock up of the things that we'd need to think about along the way. Accompanying this, we had a Questionnaire posted online to gather statistical information on the thoughts of other people. We looked to see what the majority thought about different genres and techniques of films and feel we expressed this in the planning stages.

A form of research we conducted involved looking over other Media students' blogs and mentally evaluating their work. This proved to be effective, especially for myself as we were unbiased in criticising other peoples' work. If we had evaluated our own, we may either be too favourable or too harsh on our production. By properly evaluating other pieces of coursework, and assessing their abilities of producing it, this has allowed us to avoid any similar mistakes we may make.

YouTube played a big part in our production process as it provided us with an opening to other media texts which has granted us the ability to better our piece. Through the analysis of other films, we have extracted various shots and concepts which we have found effective. Our final media piece will be a reflection of this and should be effective in the feeling we are aiming to create. The use of music also aids us in creating the piece, as we have researched various songs and sound on YouTube. Although we didn't sample any pieces, we did research into how they were used and used that knowledge to find a good choice of music which would fit well into our film.

http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ is where we had taken our song file from. Thankfully, this site operates using copyright-FREE music. Because of this and the lack of limitations as to how we use it, we decided to search throughout the site to find a song. Our final choice in the end led to 'Abducted' - the perfect choice to create suspense and unease as the viewer watches our Teaser Trailer. We have yet to import it into Adobe Premiere and use it, however we unanimously agreed it was the best choice, despite any future troubles we may face in timing it well with the shots, sounds and voice-overs.

At the moment, we are compiling our shots on Adobe Premiere, a piece of professional software which grants wide access to various transitions, effects and techniques to better our film. This is different to uLead which was rather restricted in what it had to offer and therefore had to look for alternative ways to effectively create our scene. Although we faced difficulties in editing such as being unable to remove titles from the shots, we had eventually overcome these issues after becoming more efficient with the software.

At the moment we are finishing off ordering our shots and placing transitions between them. As soon as this has been completed, we will place our music over the top and include any necessary sound effects and/or voice overs to finalise our film.

-Dale