WEEKLY JOURNALS
Week Two - Research
RESEARCH
What did you learn from your
research?
How has the research for your
medium helped you improve your
ideas?
How has the research for your genre
helped you improve your ideas?
How has researching the
conventions of your chosen genre
helped you understand what is
required from you in order to meet a
distinction grade?
I learnt a lot from my research this week, taking into
consideration aspects from each subtopic I researched, it
helped me to completely solidify my idea and feel truly
confident in something I am going to produce.
Researching my medium was a really interesting process to
take, using both primary and secondary research to do so.
Typically, short films are comedies, this is how they first
started and only fairly recently have people been making short
films with all genres. This helped me to improve my idea as I
knew that I had to stick to something with a more simplistic
idea. I felt as if it was better to find an idea that has been done
before (or a very similar concept) and make it my own. A lot of
the research foe early days in my medium involved animation
shorts and shorts with a positive tone, this wasn’t too much
help as my piece isn’t following any of those conventions so,
although I found this part thoroughly interesting to research,
overall I don’t think it made a massive impact to improving my
ideas.
The research of my genre helped cement my final idea,
looking at previous shorts made in the same genre category
and also referring to the comments on the videos helped me
figure out what people liked and disliked about the genre,
people generally enjoyed the film more if there was some kind
of psychological twist to it, but people didn’t like it if this was
too exaggerated or too complicated for the time span of the
film. I noticed that the shorter the film was, it was a good film
if the twist was more basic, they tended to come across
cheesy and cringey if the idea was too complicated for the
time,
https://youtu.be/PPwlOpwqnWs
is an example of this, in my opinion the narrative was good,
but I think it could have worked better if there was a
background story with it, but this is obviously less achievable
as the film is 11 minutes long.
Learning the conventions of thriller, I think has been the most
helpful research I have done. Not only has it helped me
understand what is needed to make a good thriller film (at
distinction level) but also has helped boost my confidence in
what I am planning to make.
 Lighting
 Sound
 Mise-en-scene
 Costuming

How has including a variety of
sources (primary and secondary)
helped with your understanding of
your medium / genre?
What sources of information did you
look at that were different from your
proposed project?
How will this be useful to your
planning?
How has the research for your
content/topic helped you improve
your ideas?
Are all aspects I found conventions of; I think If I stick to these
conventions very tightly it’ll defiantly help a lot regarding me
producing a distinction standard piece of work. Without this
research I wouldn’t have known about conventions
surrounding clothing, typically black clothes create a feeling of
uncertainty from the start and this is something I would never
have thought about but is something I am really planning on
taking on board as I think it’ll help boost my grade up and
make my production more professional, which is my aim.
For my medium, I underwent both primary and secondary
research. This included putting out a survey and asking people
what they already knew about the medium but also what they
would like to see. For secondary research I floated around the
web, especially for the history on the medium, which was also
very interesting to learn about. I used Wikipedia when
researching about Charlie Chaplin and used the timeline to see
what he had produced. For the gene and genre conventions I
used all secondary research, this is mainly because I wanted
everything to be 100% correct.
Due to covid-19 finding original sources to refer to such as
books was extremally difficult as all libraries and public places
had been locked down meaning getting external information in
this kind was not possible. I used my initiative when coming
up with my own ways of research, for example, I knew the
lockdown meant that a lot of people are bored and don’t have
much to be getting on with, this meaning they are most likey
going to be using their phones as a source of entertainment, I
used this to my advantage and took to my Instagram to ask
people questions and opinions regarding themselves as my
target audience and what genres they gravitated to. I thought
this was a good idea as a lot of people would be bored and
willing to take part in some questions, this worked to my
favour as I got the most amount of responses I have ever
received. Another thing I used my own initiative with was the
focus groups, It was obviously putting people at risk if I went
outside to ask questions so I decided to get some of my
friends up on a skype call ad film that.
The skype call was a great idea but because I was asking my
friends, it was very difficult to stay serious (as proven by the
video) and although they did answer the questions, its no
where near as good or as helpful if I were to ask people in
person, this being an environment that is easier to be
professional in, rather than a call with friends, we didn’t taken
as seriously as it should have been. The research from my
Instagram however will be very useful when coming to my
planning because it give me a good incite into exactly what
my target audience are into, this will be really helpful as I can
plan around the most common ideas and feedback I was given
to create a plan that is based off of what my audience said
they like.
For the research regarding my content, I firstly took a look at
some films with a similar structure to what I am producing
myself, this being a structure of the same day repeating itself
over and over, the most famous version of this would be ‘
Groundhog day’ I rewatched this and took notes on how they

How has the research into
artists/producers helped you
improve your ideas?
What work do you need to complete
outside of lessons to stay on track?
High Grade Tips
Research
● ‘Thorough research’ - include plenty of sources and detailed analysis of this information
● ‘relevant & coherent’ – make sure your research sources are not just the same as the
Media product you hope to make - and talk about how they inform your planning
● ‘sustained’ – continue your research throughout the eleven-week project and don’t just limit
it to the first two weeks
● ‘accomplished & considered’ – all of the above referred to in your daily/weekly reflections
made it clear to the audience that it was the same day,
another film following the same structure is ‘happy death day’,
I felt as this this helped me slightly more due to the fact the
genre was along the game lines as mine, although this is a
horror/thriller and mine will be more of a drama/thriller, it still
has that thriller aspect of it and really gave me incite into the
structure and the genre bonding together. Another aspect I
researched for my topic would be the psychopathic
behavioural side to my piece, obviously you can’t have a sane
murderer, there has to be something off and I decided to look
into this to see if it could help me further on in character
development. I wanted to understand how to portray this
behaviour in my film before it becomes something obvious to
my audience.
This helped me a lot, it was another aspect I really enjoyed
researching as well. For me this was really something that
meant a lot to talk about, considering that without these
directors I researched, we wouldn’t have some of the films I
mentions is such huge thing to think about considering their
impact to not only the industry buy also to me personally as
an aspiring filmmaker. Getting the opportunity to credit the
people who inspire me is really humbling to do. Even though
they had such huge impact on me mentally, there are many
physical aspects within their productions that have helped me
to improve my ides for my FMP. I had talked about Andy
Muschetti and his framing and shots, I talked about this as an
example in IT chapter 2 where there is a shot that tells a
whole story in just 3 seconds of footage, this is really
admirable and I am going to try and fit it in my film as I think I
will be able to make it fit the storyline well and think it would
really help my production reach a high standard. Muschetti’s
framing is really something I wish to use and help me when
regarding the filming of my own production, his framing really
helps the audience understand who/where we should be
paying to most attention to and in group conflict it shows us
who has the power and who is important in the moment
without explicitly telling us, again this being something I see
to have a massive impact in my piece (for the better) if I use it
correctly and effectively.
Due to Covid-19 all work this week has been completed from
home, therefore all work I have been completing has been off
of timbale and has been completed throughout majority of all
afternoons and evenings.