Research and Planning

I agree with the teachers' feedback that they think planning and research is the key to making a product. Therefore, I feel if we related our research to our to the production and creativity more the first time we would be able to plan our final idea with more detail by making an animatic. Thus we could have seen a real vision of what the end medium was going to be.

Our planning and research should have been in more depth because we did analyse Salt but we just didn't blog about it and it is the recording of our research that really makes us remember to use and understand the conventions - the main part of the project was the research by creating a survey to reveal who our target market was and the planning before the filming so that filming would run smoothly. Thus, unfortunately without using codes of real media texts in our first idea at all we were unable to really plan our second idea with an animatic so were not well planned, hence the filming did not run that smoothly so we had to re-shoot more than other groups. 

Fortunately, we designed a story board on paper to plan which we cut up took photos of and rearranged in Microsoft power point as it was quicker than using premier pro because we weren't that confident with using that on our own. However, we wrote the amount of seconds on each frame with arrows show which direction the protagonist was going and which way the camera would be. Thus, we had a rough idea what we were going to do when we got to the location of our set. However we had not thought about transitions until we knew the options on the software, but we knew most of them were going to be cross dissolve for the titles.

Furthermore, we should have created a shooting schedule and stuck to it in order to be more organised and find another actor that could do the times we could. Also, not the whole production team had to be there as we all knew the shot list and shots we needed to re-shoot so it was hopeless trying to get everyone we wanted all in the same place. Hence I would say our re-shoot lists were the most organised part of the process as it was filmed in the correct order needed and we could refer back to the storyboard if it was required.

Additionally, we didn't plan a costume but decided that if the male protagonist was a spy he would try and fit into the area he was living in. However, we still didn't blog about it and our teachers even said we were supposed to blog every day so now I understand that the blog is like a diary of what we have planned and the whole process of getting to the point of filming.  The plan also can help to make decisions find ideas keep some and reject other and also provide for discussion within the group to generate better ideas. This is because we have to plan what we have construct, to evaluate what we planned to construct and compare that to what we had constructed.