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.

 

My production was overall informed and influenced by the research we made during the first stages of our production process. Looking through short film conventions and understanding what they were, we decided to focus on one theme and then decided to research on that theme and try and find other short films which portrayed the same conventions and themes.

Researching through YouTube and the internet we found a number of short films that matched what we were looking for. An example of this was the Kiera Knightly domestic violence advertisement, this short film really captured the mood and feel we were looking for in our short film. We focused on this short film and got most of inspiration from it. Researching really helped our production process as it meant that we knew what we were looking for and what we had to do to achieve the best film, from the films we watched.

We also researched on posters and reviews. We looked for examples that also matched what theme we were exploring. The theme of domestic violence is very hard to portray through image without spoiling the story. We looked at an example of Nil by mouth. The film was very horrific and we felt that we needed to understand more. We looked at the poster and felt that it captured the theme of the film without spoiling the storyline or showing any gruesome pictures. The simplicity in the poster was what we wanted to capture in our poster. We wanted a simple poster that portrayed the storyline. Doing the research meant that we had a better understanding of what we were looking for, which in the end made our decision to choose an image for our own poster much easier to choose as we knew what we were looking for.

Our ability to use media texts developed over time as we knew taking inspiration from other works would help us with our production. Using examples and researching also meant that we knew more about the conventions of a poster or a short film, which meant we could understand our work a lot more. During the process of working on our ancillary review, we looked at different film review magazines to understand the conventions of a film review.