Reflection : Week One

When first presented with the option of doing a short film or a music video for our advanced portfolio most of the class, including me, jumped at the idea of the short film. I wanted to do a short film at first as I thought it would be a lot more creative. In previous years, we've made trailers and openings for a film, but we've never made an actual whole film, so I thought it would be interesting to finally do a whole film. Me and my partner, Simran straight away started talking about how we wanted to do a film that was emotionally as usually our work isn't very emotional. 

However, after talking as a class to our teacher we started to move more towards the option of music video. There are a couple of key reasons for this; first of all, I've seen a lot of music videos then I have short films, so I know more of the conventions of them without having to learn it e.g; cut to the beat, different locations and lip syncing. I am yet to learn any short film conventions. Another reason being the target audience for a short film isn't usually within our age range, so it may be difficult to produce a short film with our imaginations that would appeal to an older target audience. With music videos, they're targeted to all ages as it depends on what songs people listen to. If we did a pop song, then our target audience would probably be the same age as us or lower, so we would know what they'd enjoy watching. 

So we have now decided to do a music video. Keeping the same idea as the short film, we both wanted to do a different kind of music video. We don't want it to be a typical one that has different locations and changes about a lot, we want it to have a linear structure with a narrative. However we would still put some conventions of a music video in there such as lip syncing, so it fits in with the text. If we want to do this, we need to pick a song/genre which we can base a story on and which also isn't very upbeat that the story would look odd. 

Simran and I have already agreed to work together as we feel that we make a good team and produce work of a high level. We have been working together since the start of our Media Studies course in year 10, so we've grown a strong idea of what each other likes and dislikes to do with Media. Although it would be interesting for us to work with other people and get some other ideas that we wouldn't have thought of before, I think in the last year of our course, it'd be safer to work with someone we understand and work well with. We both put in equal amounts of effort and are willing to do a lot for the sake of our end piece. 


My hopes for this project are that we can produce a great piece of coursework that we can be proud of. In past years, we've always had an idea in our head that looks really good and when it comes to end piece it's good, but not as good as we would've liked. So this year I would like to produce something I can be 100% proud of. To do that I think we would need to make sure we don't move away from our vision.

My fear for this project is that we don't stick to our schedule. In previous years we've had to change around our production schedule a lot due to people not being available when they were before and this had an affect on our work as we had to re shoot things with new people, which left less time for editing.