Advanced Portfolio Progress Report - 02/03/10

During the past few weeks, the Pre-Production stage of my coursework has been the main focus during Media classes. Within my group, we have decided on an idea for the trailer aspect of our viral campaign, and came to a decision as to what we will be producing by each creating a viable idea, and then came together as a group to decide which idea we would go through with, by doing analysis such as a SWOT for each idea. After this had been decided, we started to get into the planning stage for the trailer, going further with our chosen idea in the way of conducting further research into different trailers of our chosen genre, as well as researching aspects such as advertising codes of practise. All of these aspects contribute to our work by making sure it will be as realistic and accurate as is possible, for example by researching the advertising codes of practise, we know what we would be allowed to include in our trailer. We also looked at the BBFC guidelines, which helped us to determine what certificate our trailer and film should be, and as a group we decided that our film will be classified as a 15 and our trailer a 12A. We decided this because we felt that the content we wanted to include fitted into these guidelines.

In the past week or so, the main focus of our group has been to address the issue of completeing our script and storyboard. These two aspects of our Pre-Production work are probably the most time consuming, but also the most important. This is because without these two aspects, we aren't really able to progress further with our trailer. After re-starting our storyboard four times, and holding meetings several times outside of class times, we finally came to an agreement on the final draft of our storyboard, including all the shots that we had in our initial ideas, as well as putting in others.

Whilst still deciding on our storyboard, each member of the group conducted individual character research, with myself taking on the research for the female protagonist, and deciding to focus on Sidney Prescott from 'Scream', played by Neve Campbell. The purpose of this research was to help inform the group of what the characters within our trailer would typically be like, for example dress codes and non-verbal communication.

Now this has been completed, during the next week the group will be spending time on organising the shoot for the trailer, which will include booking any equipment rooms that we need within the college and finding suitable actors to portray the roles in a way that we are happy with.