Describe how your understanding of the importance of good research and planning skills developed throughout the pre-production of your AS and A2 coursework

During my coursework productions my AS brief was to create a 2 minute opening sequence for a horror film including titles and my A2 brief was to create a promo package including video, digipak and advert for the pop genre. For both these projects research and planning were key concepts in order to develop into gaing my final products which were an opening horror sequence titled "Twisted" and a pop music video titled "It's All About Tonight" by Pixie Lott. Im going to discuss my progression from AS to A2 within my Research and Planning.

At AS I began my project with researching into conventions of the genre horror and what is involved in various horror films which would be a good concept for my own sequence. To do this I began to look at other horror films such as "Jeepers Creepers" and "Saw" which helped me discover various conventions I wanted to include within my video. The feeling of an antagonist after you within "Jeepers Creepers" is its key concept particularly showing shots from the antagonists perspective with the characters being unaware of his wareabouts or intentions. This was an idea we wanted to portray within our horror film as we felt it was a good way to scare the viewer to see points of view from the killer as if it was them themselves. We acheived this by using a handheld camera of the killer walking towards the couple within our video who are the main actors to show suspence and mystery as to who he is and why he's following them. Whilst looking at "Saw" we realised that an important factor was to keep key factors of the storyline hidden from the characters and viewers. This occurs within "Saws" opening sequence as a man awakes in a bath within a dark room unaware of where he is, how he got there or what is going on. The audience are also revealed a key go down the plug hole as he struggles which they are unaware of its significance. Within my video I took inspiration from this as the two main characters are unaware that the killer is behind them throughout the sequence until he attacks and the plot as to why the killer attacks is not made aparent throughout the sequence to leave mystery to the viewer. I also analysed 9 frames of existing horror films such as "Saw" and titles timelines such as "The Shining" and "A Nightmare On Elm Street" which I discovered that centrally framing is important in giving the viewers infomation yet having a hand held camera out of focus like of "The Blaire Witch Project" makes the viewers feel uneasy. The timelines shown me the order in which the titles should come in and how to show them in an effective way in order to fit with the genre for example both movies had the directors name last and dramatic music within the background, two traites which we decided to add to our film sequence to help it fit the genre and create suspence. These films both also revealed slight links of the narrative while showing the titles which we knew was an important part to our sequence, the titles being simple as the main focus would be towards the narrative so they are never centrally focused but generally to the side. Once we had researched many films within this genre we needed to plan our sequence with the various ideas we had chosen and so began writing a pitch entailing the storyline of what we planned to achieve, then we had to think of suitable locations creating a call sheet with the addresses and places such as the land behind a pond for the filming and contact numbers for our three actors and adresses. We also needed a risk assessment sheet of possible things that could go wrong such as actors becoming ill and how we would deal with the situation such as rescheduling or having stand by actors. A sketch of each shot was then drawn paying close attention to the framing and actions made and were then taken photos of with a stills camera and uploaded onto Imovie to be made into an anamatic so that we were aware of the shot order and how they would be filmed with the positioning of characters and the way in which the narrative was presented. This planning helped with our final product as it helped us work out how to involve the horror techniques we needed and make our sequence look professional.