Question 1a - Research and Planning

For both your Foundation and Advanced Portfolios, 20% of the marks have been allocated to how well you have researched and planned your productions.

Research
You will have researched TEXT, AUDIENCE, and INSTITUTION.

• Textual Research: for the Foundation film opening, and again with your Advanced teaser trailer, you were asked to research the forms and conventions of the genre you chose. You will have blogged clips from Youtube. This may have been difficult with film openings; was it easier to find trailers? Did any clips have embedding disabled so that you were only able to post a link to its URL? You may have found additional information from other sites such as IMDB, or sources of information such as textbooks. Whatever you used, the key questions to answer are: as you moved from Foundation to Advanced Production did you do more research? Better research? Was information easier to find? Did you use more/different sources?
• Audience Research: first you need discuss the purpose of your audience research. What were you trying to find out? Had you developed a story idea and were trying to find out whether or not they liked it? Were you trying to find out what an Empire reader wanted from an issue of the magazine? Next, what was the methodology? In other words, how exactly did you go about collecting this data? Did you construct a questionnaire, and if so how did you deliver it? Did you use social network sites such as Facebook? Did you use a focus group? Finally, what were your results? What did your audience actually tell you (use statistics or quotations if you can) and did that affect what you planned? Again, the emphasis is on development - did you do more/better audience research for your Advanced production than for the Foundation one?
• Institutional Research: what companies, studios, broadcasters, publishers or regulators did you find out about? Did you determine what kind of BBFC rating your film would have? Who would create/distribute/publish/exhibit your kind of product, and more importantly how did you find this out?

Planning

There were four assessment criteria for your planning mark, and it makes sense to describe what you did according to these:

1. Organisation of actors, locations, costumes and props: when you were planning your Foundation production, what kinds of problems did you encounter trying to get your actors together at the same time, or getting them to certain locations, or getting permission to use these locations, or acquiring particular costumes and objects? More importantly, how did this experience make you change what you did when you came to shoot your Advanced production?
2. Shot-lists, layouts, scripting, and storyboards: for the video tasks, did you do anything different/better with your storyboard - i.e. creating an animatic? You will have drafted layouts for your magazine and poster, which is a development of your drafting skills because you didn't have to plan a print-based task at Foundation level.
3. The quality of presentation of your research and planning: compare your Foundation and Advanced blogs - hopefully the latter will show more detail about the planning and research process.
4. Time-keeping: this means punctuality and your ability to meet deadlines. If you had created a shot-list, did you manage to stick to it? Or if not, did you go way off schedule or only a little bit? Did you have enough time to complete all the editing? Was anything rushed, or would you have liked more time for anything? Again, the important thing is: did you get better at this with your Advanced Production?