Research and Planning skills in the outcome of media products
In whatever area I work, I’ve always considered the importance of research and planning. I never start a project or an idea without creating at least a general plan. My planning has become more detailed from my Foundation Portfolio to my Advanced Portfolio. However, I am also passionate about creativity and chaos. As David Lynch said in one of his films: “The whole world is wild at heart, and weird on top”. I think that this extends to any artistic process.
The film opening (Demure) that I created with a colleague of mine was thoroughly planned from the beginning, but evolved and changed greatly over time. We had experience with creating media, we made mind maps and a mood board to present our ideas, but we knew that those were just suggestive. These ideas were greatly based on the works of David Lynch. We investigated his style, in movies such as “Eraserhead”, and later the conventions of surreal and horror genres. We knew that our film opening would use these, for example, strange music, non-linear editing (jump cuts), and a general dark atmosphere.
Throughout the year we learned about a lot of different ways of planning and structuring our project. We had our first experience with making target audience questionnaires, using Google forms, and analyzing them through info graphics. We shared the questionnaire on Reddit and on different groups on Facebook. We gathered both qualitative and quantitative information and presented it using Piktochart. We found that the people that answered our questionnaire were not very informed about indie or cult films, they were more interested in horror films that respected conventions and as Deborah Knight stated, films that are somewhat predictable offer satisfaction to the audience. Even knowing all this, we chose to go ahead with our unusual ideas as this film was not meant to reach a large audience or make profit. We simply wanted to put our ideas into practice and gain experience through this project.
After researching several examples, such as “Mullholland Dr.”, of film opening credits on artofthetitle.com I studies the conventions, and got ideas by creating a nine frame analysis for three of them. For example, we decided to break the convention of film titles and wrote all the names and the title using lower case letters. This helped me put together a mind map and slowly the script for what I wanted to create. We had the genre, the idea and later the story so I began practicing editing and sound by creating two preliminary tasks. The first small project, I created in the media and art camp organized by our school. I filmed some shots in the forest and tried to edit them together with images from 50’s and 60’s movies. I wanted to reproduce the atmosphere from one of Lana Del Rey’s works, “Burnt Norton”. I studied some of her music videos and saw that they included footage from old films. However, the camera I had was not very good and the trial of the editing program worked slowly on my computer. The product was not satisfactory for me so I created a second music video, a more elaborated one. I filmed with two of my friends for a song by the 1975 and edited in iMovie on my mother’s laptop. This allowed me to create a clearer story with more beautiful images, but still, I only used basic editing techniques, transitions and cuts on beats. However, it was good practice because the soundtrack was an important part of our film opening.
Comparing my planning process from As with that from A2, I can notice a great improvement. Overall, the whole process was a lot smoother. I didn’t really have to think about all the steps that I had to take up to the production of the short film, they came almost naturally.
There where slight differences in the way I conducted research this year, speeding up the process. There was no need to conduct a target audience questionnaire because I knew what types of audiences I wanted to reach, so I created the info graphic directly in Piktochart. I also worked more on the design of this presentation as I was already familiar with the online program. I researched various short films from different genres, such as “Removed”. I found the conventions and the ways in which powerful stories are presented in short periods of time. I also studied short film websites and festival postcards for the minor tasks. I wrote down all my observations on my blog.
For my preliminary tasks I used Adobe Premier Pro on my new Asus laptop, this resulted in a much more professional outcome. I also had the chance to investigate new effects such as overlays and text effects. This practice was really important for my final work, a short film about friendship and personal struggle, called “Iridescent”. I did not use a strict call sheet for my As final work nor did I not use one for the advanced portfolio. This was because I worked with my group of friends and we organized ourselves according to our availability, and opportunity. We filmed one night before New Year’s Eve at a friend’s house, for example. Not a lot of planning was involved in these filming sessions because the action I presented was very similar to reality, and how the people involved usually spend their time. Therefore, I was spontaneous, after setting up the location with lights and music, I just filmed different angles of my friends talking or dancing.
To conclude, the research and planning I conducted for my As Portfolio was a very important base for the short film I did this year. I understood all the steps in the production of a film and I was familiar with researching conventions and putting my ideas together in a clear, visual format.
