Detail Your Understanding of the Importance of Good Research and Planning Skills Developed Throughout the Pre-production of Your AS and A2 Coursework.

Mock up versions and drafts were always an important stage of the course because it meant you could get your initial ideas down so that both you and the teachers could see which direction you were going in. After this you could build on what you already had with new ideas inspired from existing products or influential images or videos. These new ideas would come from the research and planning stages, meaning the more you did the more ideas you came up with and the better they were. In AS as well as the mock ups and self-evaluation I also created a questionnaire including questions about colour scheme and font types etc. This helped to guide my ideas down a particular route and tailor them to my target audience. For A2 I mainly looked at conventions of existing products as influence and I went into a lot of detail when analysing these products to make sure that my digipak, advert and music video all including the details to make them look more professional.

Part of the research and planning was making sure that the sources were reliable and accurate. A lot of the research I did was online, making it very easy to get hold off. However, this meant that sometimes you would come across unreliable sources such as student made magazines, which weren’t a good source to base my own product from. To overcome this I stuck to using well-known names such as Kerrang! and NME. I tried to make sure that any facts and figures I used as feedback I had collected myself (the questionnaire for example) rather than relying on somebody else’s data.

Good organisation of the data I collected was key to making sure I didn’t lose anything and that I could find everything I was looking for. Labelling posts on the blog and making sure everything was dated and in chronological order made the process a lot easier.  My organisation skills definitely developed from AS to A2.

I always made sure to complete my work on time and meet the deadlines. I also created deadlines for myself within the course to keep up to date and organised. Having to organise other people was hard to do because of the other priorities that they had and finding time where we could all meet up. Thankfully, we minimised this issue by casting me to be in the video, meaning I was always available and willing to put the hours in. I learnt very quickly that within the production schedule there wasn't a lot of room for movement because it would cause a domino effect and everything would build up. I think I worked well, my strengths being communication and inputting ideas but I could have spent more time on the blog posts and put more detail into the evaluation process.

The planning process was very different at A2 than at AS because I was working in a pair with Mae. The planning took longer but it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. A lot of the time when working independently I would have to change or edit my planning or refer back to the plan a lot because I didn't perhaps think of everything. Because I was working in a pair the planning stage was a lot more detailed because Mae could pick out things I didn't think of. This meant that once the planning was done, it was pretty final and there wasn’t any need to go back and change anything.

I think that the planning stage at A2 was a lot more detailed and took longer. We created a storyboard which was vitally important throughout the whole of the production and post-production stages. It was first used to put our ideas into motion and start to order everything. Then once we had completed it we took it with us to the filming sessions, because we didn't film everything in order we could put to one side the shots we had filmed so we knew what we had left. We then used it again after all the filming had been done to help edit the video. All the shots were numbered so it made it a lot easier to put the video together. I also created progression posts on my blog, mainly for me than for the teachers. It was always good to write down what had been done and what needed to be done so that I could work out what time we had left. It helped keep me organised and kept stress levels down.