Research And Planning

Research And Planning

Research

Moving forward from AS I learnt a lot of things and one of the biggest things I learnt was how to do research into exactly what I was looking. In My AS course I was part of a team to create a LOCAL RADIO NEWS BROADCAST. I had to do research on things such as the GENRE and AUDIENCES. The Genre was obviously NEWS and the Audience was of course LOCAL, as it was a Local Radio News Broadcast. Relating last years work to this years work I know that my Target audience are cineastes (People who like to watch every type of movie or short film). For my A2 course I have to make a five minute SHORT FILM. 

I know that in order to make a very good short film I have to do appropriate research into my TARGET AUDIENCE. My short film is not aimed at people who do not watch short films because I know from my research that they will not waste their time watching it because it is not their type of film. 

There are many ways in which I can conducts my research and usually they are very efficient which is good for when it comes to knowing about my target audience. The two biggest research methods are Primary Research and Secondary Research. 

Primary Research: 

Method	Advantages	Disadvantages
Questionnaires	·      You can hand the questionnaires to your specific target audience. ·      When the researcher gets the information they can analyse it specifically and choose which information they want to use.	·      The answers may sometimes not be relevant to what the researcher wants to know ·      The answers the participants give may not be the truth ·      Participants could have rushed the questionnaire because they didn’t want to really do it
Interviews	·      You can get accurate information from those who are taking part. ·      You can get honest answers ·      You can use most answers given for your research	·      They take up a lot of time ·      Not everyone will be able to attend the meetings

Secondary Research:

Method	Advantages	Disadvantages
Internet	·      You can easily access the information ·      Usually accurate information	·      The information may be out of date.
Books	·      They are easy to find and read ·      The information never changes	·      May not be relevant

Most Media Producers look at several factors before starting producing Media. These factors range from the equipment they have, the budget of the media they want to make and the availability of areas they have to use to produce the Media. In the case of my group we are producing a 5 minute Short film, which has virtually no budget and can shoot the images and recording in any area we want. We have been provided with the equipment to make our 5 minute Short Film which saves us a lot of time and money.

My last project was producing and 5 minute Local Radio News Show. During the year I had to do a lot of research into the Genre of Local Radio News and its Codes and Conventions. Most of this was done through primary and secondary research methods. With the 5 minute short film I will be doing similar research as to the research I done last year. 

I have very little experience recording with a camera and getting a good quality recording but it is something I will work on in order to get the best recordings possible. I also have very little experience with editing software but I will also work on editing softwares in order to become familiar with it and be able to edit the clips we take. 

Evaluating other Short-Film 

This is the first Short Film in which I am going to evaluate its codes and conventions and how our short film either uses, develops or challenges this Short Film. This film is similar to ours because it is about lying and covering up the truth because the characters are too scared to be honest. This particular short film is about a man who is struggling for people to like him and he realises the only way he can get people to like him is to lie. This is again similar to our short film because the characters are lying to each other in order to 'fit in'. A code and convention in 'WHITE LIES' is they only use 2 main characters with a few extras, however our Short Film challenges this as we have 4 extra characters, all with very important roles in the Short Film because they set the scene for what we are trying to achieve.

The second code and convention for this short film is how they had the main character as the narrator as well, mainly speaking about the letter he had written, explaining why he had lied. our short film challenges this again as we do not have a narrator, instead we chose to let the characters speak throughout the whole of the production. A code and convention in which our Short Film uses from this Short Film is the use of background music to set the tone of the environment. For example we used some rap to set the scene of the type of Short Film we wanted, where as this short film used more of a simple and serious song to set the tone for setting they were trying to create.

The sounds which are used in this Short Film are only used when the moment is serious which is very often in the case of this Short Film. However with our Short Film we have different rap songs throughout different stages and when the scene changes, so this code and conventions is being challenged as we felt it would be better if there was music when the scene changes but only for a few seconds before it starts fading away.

The last code and convention is the length of both Short Films. Short Films range from 2 minutes to 20 minutes however we were only allowed to have a maximum of 5 minutes, where as this short film went on for 15 minutes, because they had more things to put in to make the scenes more clearer. We felt as if 5 minutes was enough for us to get our point across because the timing limited us so it allowed us to get straight to the point.

This is the second Short Film in which I will be evaluating its codes and conventions. The first code and convention is the starting shots used. In our Short Film we took some audience feedback and a suggestion was made that we should change the opening shot which was originally to get a full shot of the location we decided to create our Short Film, instead we decided to put a selection of different pictures of the characters, we felt this challenged the codes and conventions because we haven't yet seen a Short-Film that has been started in that way.


The second code and convention is the background music that's playing throughout of the whole Short Film where as ours only again only has music at selected times as opposed to having it play throughout the whole production. This is mainly because both Short Films are different genres and are trying to get different points across. The songs preferred in this Short Film are long and create tension and specific moments especially when the characters stop talking, the background noise starts to take over. We developed the use of different songs by not using as much because we felt that what the characters had to say was very important.


Another code and convention is the different shots we used, we used the same shots for most of our scenes because that way it keeps it more professional and it keeps the audience entertained. These shots were best for us because we were able to get the most important shots very clearly.

Planning

Below are images of our storyboard for the second short film we created. This made it much easier when we came to shoot our scenes because we knew straight away what we wanted to do and the storyboard made the shot selection much easier when we came to do the recordings.

This is a group schedule in which we created in order to keep track of what we needed to do by a certain date  and when we needed to start it.
This was a group plan which we created while in a group meeting, to discuss edits and to plan tasks for each member in our group to complete in order to work as fast as we possibly can.

Individual timetables:

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
				1st – Prepare Blog Work	2nd- Look over past papers for exam	3rd- work on my blog
	5th- Work with Mr Matthew on post production	6th- Group meeting to plan for the month ahead	7th- Gather audience feedback	8th Blog Work	9th- meetings with both AS and A2 groups	10TH Revise for Mock
	12th- Make a timetable for our project	13th- Review Team logo with Yazid	14th- Analyze feedback and improve for post production	15th – meeting with Mr Lynch	16TH – Blog work	17th- Attend the London Film Festival event
18th- Talk about my experience in the London Film Festival	19TH- Meet Michelle to make a vlog		21st- Work on blogs

In order for us to create a successful short film and a successful blog we needed to create our own timetables which we needed to stick to in order to complete our work on time. This following timetable is the first one I made at the beginning of January, with my team members Michelle and Yazid. We sat down in a group meeting to organise this so we didn't have any clashes with anything else we had to complete. This Timetable is one of few that we made in order to succeed with the Short-Film. It was very difficult to create this because we had so many characters and we could only record when they had time and when they were available, which made it harder for us to organise a timetable to stick by. Sometimes we had to go against our timetables in order to try and complete our work quicker, which is what we done by trying to blog almost every lesson and every day that we had the chance to.

Recci (Picking a location) 

From our first group meeting we knew exactly where we wanted to start recording and that was Paddington Recreation Ground, which is behind our school and we chose this place because it is where our characters usually hang around so they would be familiar with the surroundings and feel comfortable doing the work. 

However the decision we had to make was where around the park, we felt was best to get a lot of good shots and also would be the perfect place to record our characters. The following Pictures Show the locations within the park that we had chosen to short list for our production: 

These were our Short listed locations, and we made a decision to have it at the local cafeteria at first but then we realised that it would be extremely difficult with the amount of people constantly coming in and out and we also took into consideration that we would need more than one day to record and that there would be different people each time which would create inconsistency within our short-film, so we ended up going for the pull up bars because there would be limited people there in the morning and we would be able to record with consistency and also we would be able to take several different shots which would improve our short-film.
We also decided to pick this location over set of bars because this is also where our characters sat down more than the local cafeteria, so we thought it would be more realistic if we chose to have that location.

Ideas

We had man ideas for a short film before we actually started to record and get into our production, some of the ideas were: 

A young man chasing a dream 

A group of boys with two of them lying to the others

A young girl and a young boy in love

These are only few of the ideas we had and these were all the more realistic one we had. We ended up choosing A group of boys with two of them lying to the others because we had so many good ideas which were realistic and it could definitely be produced. All of the ideas we had were all put into the short film with several different shots which we meant. We also chose this Short-Film idea because we felt sometimes this can happen to young teenagers and they are just ignored but however we put a twist on ours with the characters we chose and the things they are lying about. We felt that we didn't want it to be too serious but we wanted to give an impression as if it was going to be, which is why our radio show sounded very serious at first.

Coming up with the name of the short film was another task which we found a bit difficult because we wanted it to be something different, and we were originally thinking something along the lines of the word "deceive" and we started to match up several ways of saying "lies" and after some research we found the word Deceit which we felt matched our intentions with the short film. 

Production

Gathering the actors together was possibly one of the toughest challenges we faced as a group because we had so many to gather and we had to try find a time where they were free to allow us to record them as well as finding a time while we were free, so it was very difficult trying to gather them all at once. One decision we had to make based on this was changing one of the characters because the one we had originally planned to use was no longer available so we felt that we needed to find a replacement because he played an important role for our short-film. 

Going to the location was extremely easy because it is located behind our school so it made carrying the expensive and heavy equipment easier, because we did not have to travel very far in order to start recording. However the weather was not on our side when we planned to start filming originally. The strong wind made it very difficult to hear the characters speak. We decided that we would use a microphone and place it in between the characters but this turned out to be a bad idea because the wind was hitting straight onto it, making it hard to hear both characters. So we had to wait for the weather to turn around so that it would be suitable to record, and we eventually got a chance to do it and we managed to record all the scenes and edit it together. 

We put a video together showing different recordings we took of the characters and you can hear that the sound is extremely off and that it would have had to be re-recorded.

Post Production:

Our post production vlog shows the progress we've made and how we got there. We also discuss things such as the shots we used in our short film production. The blog is a very important part of the production because it summarises everything we done as a group and everything we done for the Short-Film. 

(Visit The main task and Ancillary to view both of our production Vlogs)