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Week Five
In the fifth week of my Final Major Project, I completed a few of the Planning Documents, the Pitch, Proposal Form and I began working on the Script.
Action Plan Follow-Up
The first target I set myself this week was to work on my Time Management, I have really focused on ensuring I improve that his week which I why I set myself specific Planning Documents to start working on instead of just generalising and allowing myself to do whatever ones I feel, whenever I feel. This has gone really successfully, I allocated myself Three Documents to work on and I have made great progress in planning my Final Major Project so far.
The other target I set myself to complete this week was the Project Proposal, and as this is one of the specific Planning Documents I set for myself, I have completed this to a good standard and I am very pleased with myself.
Feelings
I felt very eager and keen to get going with the Planning of my Final Major Project. The Planning Stage is the section where I begin to really enjoy my period as I love slowly watching my film come together. There was minimal stress this week I had a fairly calm time working on the Pitch, apart from some presentation issues, this was due to the fact I already had an in-depth idea of what I wanted to create so putting it down on a document was no issue for me. I felt very confident at the end of Week Five, the progress I had made with the Script really pleased me and I had such high hopes with the narrative of my Short Film.
Evaluation - The Pitch
Starting with the Pitch was the best idea in my opinion. What went well was the Pitch gave me that initial foundation to start working on the Script. Throughout the Pitch, I underlined the whole story going into detail about the plot, characters and themes I’m exploring. This became a huge help when I started writing the Script as I knew the format of the story beforehand, I just needed to add specific parts such as the dialogue.
Stating what had changed from my Initial Concept Presentation to my Final Pitch was an element that had been shown well in my Final Pitch. In my Initial Concept, I said I wanted to create a Sad Dramatic Film. Within my Final Pitch, I stated that the change between the Sad Dramatic Film I wanted to create in my Initial Concept was still somewhat true it was going to be an emotional journey however, I wanted it to end on a high note.
Whilst working on the Pitch, the presentation side to this document was not going well throughout the first part of the week. I was finding it very difficult to acquire a nice theme to fit the aesthetic and most importantly, my branding. I wasn’t overly familiar with how to use Google Slides and it wasn’t a website I used often. So, I found this YouTube Tutorial to customise the theme of my Pitch more to my liking. This wasn’t 100% perfect and something I was proud off, but I was way more satisfied with it after watching this tutorial than I was before.
The Script
The progress I made with the Script was something I’m hugely proud of and this wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the level of detail I put into my Final Pitch. An area that went surprisingly well within my Pitch was how well I could flow the dialogue. Typically throughout my last two years on Film and TV, I have avoided dialogue scenes at all costs. However, as I have been developing my writing skills with over 4 films written now, I am very proud of the development of my dialogue scenes. The well-flowing dialouge ensures I am keeping this project complex by moving out of my comfort zone and intending to include a lot of dialogue throughout my film!
Something that could’ve seen an area of improvement within the Script is the layout, it felt messy and all over the place. I didn’t label the scenes properly the location, the description of the scene wasn’t consistent in where it was placed for each scene. This is something that I will ensure I go back on and fix for next week, whilst keeping it consistent throughout the rest of the film.
Project Proposal
I was really happy with the Project Proposal, I believe I did a really good job in outlining everything that is stated in the criteria to achieve a distinction. An area in particular that I added within the rationale was underling how much I have struggled with Time Management in the past. You can see this is backed up in the majority of my Reflective Logs as I like to set this as a target to really ensure I improve on it as it plays a massive part in the quality of my work. I believe this was important to do as it always reminds me to think about managing my time as sometimes, especially when working on Practical elements, I can get carried away from the time I set myself to do this in.
When it came to the Concept section of my Project Proposal, I stated that ‘this year I researched within my Contextual Report into the importance of actors as this is detrimental to portraying a realistic message to the viewer. So I went about Experimenting and posting Casting Calls on Social Media’. I believe this stage went well as I highlighted where the stages in my project linked, a necessary part to ensure I am meeting the distinction criteria, the Contextual Research Report helped me underline the importance of casting which was going to be a heavy focus in my Planning.
Creating the Project Proposal on a whole, went really successful and I couldn’t fault much however, when it came to putting it up on my WIX site I had huge issues with this as it cut off half my work preventing me from displaying all my Bibliography. I needed the examiners to see the biblography as this would prevent me from obtaining a merit, let alone a distinction. This had me rather stressed out initally, but I used my Problem Solving skills to sort this issue out in the end.
Conclusion
To conclude Week 5 of my Final Major Project, I am really proud with the development I have made to the start of Planning. Starting with these documents has definitely begun the foundation for the rest of them, and I am looking forward to seeing my project progress as I begin to plan more.
Action Plan
The one area in particular that really annoyed me was how poorly laid out my script became. The information in my script was detailed but it was confusing as it was so unneat. So a target I am going to be setting myself to complete by next week is to sort out the layout of my Script for the existing parts on there and for the future parts I add.
As I will be continuing to plan next week another target I am going to set myself is to stay consistent with it. Time Management is an area I cleary stated within my Project Proposal that needs improvement so, I would plan out a rough idea of what I aim to complete the upcoming week, to ensure I stay on track.
Problem Solving
The first issue I had this week on Tuesday was putting my Project Proposal onto WIX. WIX used to have an old PDF Viewer where this normally would allow me to scroll, so adding the new and updated WIX PDF viewer, I would not have expected to encounter this issue. Where my bibliography was rather long you would be required to scroll through it however, WIX does not allow you to do this so you are only able to see the first few lines of my citations.
Citations are an important part of my Final Major Project, so I needed to find a way to showcase these to ensure I can achieve a distinction. I experimented for ages with different WIX PDF viewers trying each one out but all of them did the same thing except one, which I wasn’t able to use anyway as it had a large watermark displayed over the Proposal preventing me from being able to read it properly. After a while of Experimenting, when I went back to the original viewer, I saw a button called Presets that allowed me to change the Layout to a Full Window where I could thankfully scroll on my Bibliography section. This was hidden in the settings tab so it was pure luck that I managed to find it.
To ensure this issue does not happen again, I will make sure my PDF’s are always set to Full Viewer instead of Partial.
An issue I had when it came to making the Pitch was finding an aestehtic theme that could fit my consistent branding. As someone who had rarely used Google Slides, I knew how to use the pre-made themes but I had never looked into customising my own. Ensuring that I had a consistent theme throughout was a key element of the distinction criteria on Year 2 of Film and TV, so if I wanted to achieve the highest grade possible I needed to make sure this was done to the best of my ability however, my lack of knowledge with Google Slides was preventing this.
DISTINCTION CRITERIA
PRESENTATION
So, to solve this problem I found myself a YouTube Video to watch that explains how to customise themes on Slides. After watching this tutorial I won’t lie, I felt like a bit of idiot as it was so simple to customise the theme it was only a few buttons. However, this was an issue that still stumped me so it was a problem I needed to solve to ensure I could showcase my branding to the best of my ability.
To ensure this won’t happen again, I will make sure I learn the program I’m using well before it comes to the important stages of a project as this, in other cases could affect my workflow vastly and the time I have to complete certain tasks.
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