Starting Research
Now that my Official Proposal is handed in, I need to get started on my research. Pretty soon I realised that my thoughts and concerns about how to organise my research, which I wrote about in Blog 3, were valid, because although I had planned on starting by researching other videos on camera movement and looking at YouTube videos to research the Format/Style of my video, there was a lot of "cross subject" content in these videos, e.g. videos of camera movement included different types of camera movement, camera movement equipment, had possibly useful clips that I could use, contained some of the theory of camera movement etc etc.
I got rather bogged down trying to keep track of what was useful, and also I ended up going off in different directions to what I had planned at times because it seemed the natural course to follow on a particular thought train.
Because of this, I was finding it really difficult to keep up with the amount of research that I had planned to do. This was making me anxious and made me think that maybe I had not planned my research well. So, I decided to step back and try to analyse what the main problem was and try to find a solution. These are some of my thoughts,
1) If I didn't follow the thought train, then I lost the thread. I had tried making a note to go back and follow it, but by the time I went back to it I had lost the thread anyway. So, I concluded that I needed a way to be able to follow the thought train.
2) I realised that a part of the problem was that I was feeling like I wasn't getting enough research done because I wasn't keeping to my research schedule. But when I thought about it, although I was getting "behind" in some research, I was actually effectively getting ahead on other areas. So, could I use this thought to reduce my worries?
3) I was finding that I needed time in between research to allow my brain to digest what I was finding out fully and work out the links between the various research so that I could draw useful conclusions, and link things together.
4) As various ideas were forming, from my research. I was needing to go back and look again at things to develop the ideas.
I concluded that in many ways it was inevitable that I would feel concern since research is not something that you can say for sure "It will take this amount of time". But on the other hand, you can give yourself a set amount of time and say, "I will do as much research as I can in that time".
In thinking about this, I tried to relate it to real life filming in the film industry. I realised that because films have schedules, that it will cost money if you don't stick to, this must happen there too, and so I will need to just try to get as much research done as I can within the time available. Having my schedule, showing what research I believe I need to do, will help.
I'm thinking that I can also see if I can improve my time management skills too. This will improve my research because it will help me to work efficiently to achieve as much as I can, but also I need to be sensible and not overload myself because then I can't think clearly due to me feeling I am failing. I will work on finding a good and effective balance.
Pre-production - Script
I started writing some ideas for my script. Some parts I don't know the order they will be in yet. I'm glad I made the decision to give myself a long time for the script as I think I am going to need to keep revising it as my research uncovers other good material, and I'll need to keep reviewing what stays in my script and what I remove.
Website development
Because I found creating my website challenging, I decided that I needed to work more on my website, because I need to learn more about how to design websites in order to make it the best that I can. I made a text box and started typing an introduction to and description of my project. I'm still not confident editing my website, I will need to spend some more time learning how to do this. I searched on "editing Wix website" in YouTube and I found there are quite a few YouTube videos on the subject which look like they could be helpful. I will schedule in some time to watch some of them to see if they help me, and I will include this in my research. I have also had the idea of making myself a second private website that I can load different templates into and use them to work out how they did layouts and effects that I think could be useful for my project website. I decided that looking at a range of different templates will let me see what other functions and layouts I could use in my website, because I think that sometimes you don't know that you want a certain layout/functionality if you don’t know that it exists. Once you see it in another website you go "Oh that's a good idea, that would be helpful for my website."
Overall Reflection and Evaluation
Although I started out feeling concerned that I had not planned my research well, reflecting on this helped me to make the necessary adjustments to my approach to research that I think will help it to be useful and successful. I learnt how valuable it is to keep stopping for a moment and doing reflection because until I started my research I didn’t have the necessary information about how it would go to be able to realise how I could improve the process. Writing a blog about reflecting and evaluating is good, but I also have to make sure that I really am taking the time to think about it and analyse why I am feeling a certain way, since I find that hard. But I am working on improving it since whenever I do stop and analyse why I am feeling a certain way about my project, or about why I am getting worried, I am finding solutions.
My Key Learning: Stop, Reflect, Analyse, Evaluate and then find a solution. I learnt the value of stopping for a moment if I am getting concerned about part of the FMP and taking the time to work out what the problem is. This is also true for most things in life, so it is a good skill to learn and practise. It doesn’t feel totally natural to me yet to do that when I get concerned, even though I do like problem solving, but I am working on it and improving so I will practise and try and learn to do it when I get concerned, because this will save me time.
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