Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for production developed over time.
Researching media texts help develop my own media product because it gave me an idea of what i need to include in my film. When researching i used youtube.com and shortoftheweek.com as a guide, youtube because it has films previous students had made, as well as films that had been created on phones etc that were amateur yet seemed proffesional, and shortoftheweek because it had proffesional short films as well as amateur. All of the videos I watched helped me discover the conventions of a short film, i also expanded my knowledge by using google.com to help me find the generic conventions used in all short films. Some of these were a) there are rarely more than two or three characters b) a twist c) situational. These are the ones that i chose to use in my film because a short film doesn't have enough time to develop a relationship with more than one or two characters and as my film was 5 minutes, it was not possible to develop a relationship with anyone apart from Mia, possibly a brief relationship with her mother.
Before the film production i had to research my locations, as well as taking into consideration health and safety issues, because my partner and i filmed by a bus stop, i had to make sure there wouldn't be any accidents by the road. As well as that, i had to make sure my possesions weren't in danger so i made sure the area i filmed in was safe and well lit, just in case something went wrong.
I used websites like twitter and facebook when doing my audience research as well as asking friends for their opinions of the storyline, this was because my audience was young adults i knew the best way to ask was through such social networking sites because most of the 'facebook friends' i have are around the age i wanted the target audience to be. When i did my first draft, i posted the link onto facebook and asked my peers to answer the questionairre about my film to see how i could improve and get a wider target audience and whether or not the story was something they would be interested in watching once it was completed.
I also did a fair deal of research for my ancillary, in particular posters, where i used poster websites to narrow down the main conventions used typically. I used the format used on the posters on my own to make mine seem like a realistic portrayal of what i would see adverised in newspapers, on buses etc. For example how i recieved the feedback for the film, i used to same technique of putting a copy of the poster onto facebook and asking people to fill in the questionaires i had made, then using the feedback to make sure it was similar to the main product, in terms of the fonts of the title and caption, and theme.
Using experience from ASand a film award I did for the school's media arts week, I already had editing experience which helped me put Earth Bound together effectively so it had a developed narrative and tension towards the end. I had a sufficient amount of knowledge about iMovie, which I used for AS the arts award production, so this already gave me an idea on how to cut clips to construct a certain effect. The use of music and ambiance also helped create tension, so deciding what music I should use for each scene was difficult, I used several uncopyrighted CD's and several websites, using genres and paces I thought would be right in each clip, for example, needing a dramatic build up for the end, yet a more upbeat tune for the rest of the film.
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