RESEARCH: Skills Audit

Having already completing a project in the AS year, I am well aware of the importance of research. My research since has improved compared to the beginning of the AS year.

Before we had done any research, my group in AS had already had everything planned out and we knew what we wanted to do. However, not much research had gone into how we're going to get it done. We first had an initial idea, but through research by looking at the opening 2 minutes of various thriller films, we realised some of our ideas need to be changed slightly. This research gave us something to compare to, and once we analysed our idea, we changed it a bit.

Location wise, we were completely stuck; we had no idea where to start and what locations to record in as we had done no research. After watching more videos, we concluded that the setting is the most important thing after the concept of a video. This is because the setting can "make or break" a video in terms of realism and mise en scene. In the beginning, we didn't even know how to start researching into a location if we don't know about its existence. Then we decided to go around college and see if there was any place which we could record in. After watching past student videos, we managed to get ideas and realised that research can provide us with ideas. This was when we thought about a place one member in our group had been to before and decided to research if it was open the public, safe, met what we was looking for etc... All of this research was done online and talking to the owners of the location over the phone.

Having not done any research, my group would not have come up with this amazing location in which we filmed our AS Thriller in. The inside of the building met the exact mise en scene we were looking for; dark, gloomy, dirty, trapdoors and with a lot of real props e.g. saws, chains, old furniture etc...

Since then, I have taken a lot into consideration when it comes to research, what to research and what we're looking for when we research. This is because I thought we would get our idea and go out and start recording. But without full knowledge of what we were actually doing or going to do, we realised that research plays a major part in planning. This is the same with the music video we are going to create. Now, it is direct instinct to do some research before getting straight into it, so we can learn a few things and plan propery. This is especially important in what we're doing as we need to get the mise en scene right, representation right, a relevant location and the correct image we are trying to imply to the audience. The music video we are doing needs to match the genre of the song we are making a video for. Viewing and researching many music videos of songs in the same genre we are doing allows us to get ideas of what is expected and how we can do it. This level of research needs to be conducted before we can begin recording, and this is something I did not consider at the beginning of AS. This shows how far my researching skills have developed over the course of last year.