Research and Planning Questions

How effective was your planning and research for each project?

When we filmed our children's film we had to do lots of research on other childrens films and what was expected to be seen in them and what wasnt allowed to be included. We had to do some research on the age ratings of films which really helped us when planning what we were going to include in our work because it showed us what we couldnt do.

When planning our films, we made time lines storybards and also wrote down our ideas of what camera shots we wanted to use and where we wanted to film. This was really helpful as it allowed us to get as much filming done as possible.

What we could have done to improve our work is to have spent more time on our music for the work because it didn't fit very well with what we had filmed.

We think that both planning and research could have been better for this project but because we wern't as skilled as we are now so when we look back on our workwe realised how much better it could have been. For example we could have made the film alot more exciting and original.

When researching ideas for our thriller film we had lots more to investigate. We wanted to have a look at special effects because we wanted to include cuts and blood i our opening sequence. We also wanted to have a dark lighting in our sequence so we watched quite a lot of the beginnings of thriller films.

When planning our work we did story boards and time lines again but this time we also did a practise filming session to see what angles would look good. We took a camera with us to take still images of where we wanted to film and we experimented with the lighting of the images to see which would be best to film. We also had to practise using the fake blood as we didnt know how it would work.

When doing our thriller i think we could have made the special effects a bit more realistic as it looked a bit amateur. I also think we could have thought of a better soundtrack as when we watched other people work we had used the same music as a lot of other people. If we were to do this task againw e would spend more time on creating better music for the video and also making our jump cuts fit with the music better.

I thik that for this opening sequence we could have done more research for our work because then we could have created a more realistic and better film. We did enough plannng so that we knew what we were doing and we were very organised.

When we made our music video we had to watch lots of videos and research artists to get an idea of what we needed to do in our own video. This really helped us as no one in the group really listened to electro/techno music. We also went on artists myspace profiles to look through their pictures to get an idea of how they dressed etc. This also helped because it showed us how they posed for their albums which gave us ideas on how to create our digipak.

When planning our music video we created storyboards how ever they ended up changing when we actually filmed our video so this wasn't very useful. However we did do lots of test shots of what we wanted to film which was helpful because it saved us time when actually filming the video.

If we were to do the video again i think that we should have used more editing styles on our green screen parts as some of it didnt look very good. We also think that we should have made the video more consistent. Our original idea was to use feet in the video however we only really featured feet in the second half of the video.

We think that we did lots of really good research for the video which gave us lots of good ideas however our planning could have been better which would have ended us with a better result.

Over the past two years we have all noticed a change in our work. When we would first do research and planning for our work it would be very basic and we would experiment as much with ideas as we were unsure of how to do them. Now we all put our ideas in together and produce better work. We have a better knowledge of how to plan our work and get it done in time. We also know that when researching work you don't just have to use search engines eg google. You can get information form any where for your work.