AS Coursework Reflection

Research and Planning

-What real media and audiences did you look at?

In the early stages of planning our production, we looked at many different websites to see how they promoted their film as well as magazines, TV adverts and billboard displays, doing so gave us a much better idea on how real productions would get their audiences appeal making them want to go and see the film. We mainly looked at action/adventure films because at this point we weren't sure what genre we wanted to created; in particular, The Hobbit and Bat Man. 

-How did they inform your thinking about your media production? 

When looking at the Facebook page for The Hobbit, we were informed about how the creative sides of production can be as it showed this in video diaries that were uploaded. These video diaries also gave us an in site on who was going to be in the movie, the settings of the film etc, which created unique selling points as the actors starred in the film are popular and well known.

-How did you record all that research? 

The easiest way to record all the research we made was by adding it to our blog pages, creating a new document for each area of research. We didn't always right about each piece of information we gathered, we sometimes recorded video footage, used pictures etc. Each post showed our progress and changes we made to convert to the stereotypes of a horror.

-What secondary research was undertaken? 

Once we knew what type of research we had to do of our own for our own film, we began to look at different ways we could present our characters, by looking up YouTube tutorials of protagonist makeup ideas, because we wanted our victim to appear vulnerable and innocent we decided to dress her in bright sensible colours as thats what the videos taught us. We also began to look at different fonts that other movies of the same genre have used, this was to make sure we didn't subvert the stereotypical expectations in which a horror movie would include, going on to look at film posters and DVD covers throughout the years to make sure our font was upto date and not completely clichéd from the older movies. After finding which font and which costumes we wanted to take on for our opening two minutes, we then began to look at different sounds and music to add in to created a more haunting effect. We looked from a range of violin playing and piano to screams and footsteps.

-What is the effectiveness of these kinds of research?
This research effected our production as it gave us a clearer understanding on what everyone else thinks is the conventions of this genre, the research also allowed us to look further into creating a good horror movie that would appeal to its target audience, making our final opening two minutes stronger. Looking at different posters and web pages let us explore different types of media and advertising for films, which benefited the way we presented our two minutes by using the fonts and colours as inspiration because of their connotations.