PLANNING: What We Did In Class Today

Today in class we revised what things we should add to our blog in order to keep it up to date. I also made a To Do List of things to research and blog posts to upload. We then went on to discuss film trailers and images for our print based media.

As a class we then looked at the Examiner's report for June 2012 in order to find out what could be improved upon this year. It also enabled us to discover what had been constructed well.

Below is what the Examiner's report said about Film Trailers:

"The best film trailers clearly demonstrated excellent understanding of the genre and the ways the texts work to intrigue audiences and entice them to watch the whole film. These made use of a variety of shot types which made for effectively paced trailers in the edit; centres seem to have finally realised that a trailer should be maximum two minutes and should try to act as a tease for the film’s story. More candidates made use of intertitles and did this well but there was a marked lack of voice overs for trailers (although this might be down to issues of equipment). However, far too many trailers submitted followed the narrative sequence of the film they were promoting, including giving away major plot points or twists, and used few camera shots with little variety of shot types and mise-en-scene, which demonstrated weak understanding of the genre. In these cases, more focused analytical research would have been more beneficial prior to the planning stage." 

Below is what the Examiner's report said about the construction of the main tasks:

"Lighting was an issue for many centres; sound recording on video a problem for others. Such issues either need to be addressed or other briefs chosen in order to maximise candidate marks. Expensive equipment isn’t necessary in that research properly applied to planning combined with technical confidence generally results in pleasing outcomes. However, the move to DSLRs is bringing with it a new aesthetic, with candidates less likely to move the camera (the more unforgiving depth of field perhaps being the reason?) but experimenting much more with focus, resulting in pieces which made greater use of the foreground and background as well as the left/right top/bottom of the frame. A number of centres are still carrying out their production work in the school/ college surroundings, when it is not appropriate for the mise en scène. The availability of locations should also be considered in choosing production tasks."