Reflecting back on my AS Coursework

What were the strengths of my AS Coursework?

• I believe my AS Coursework went very well. I believe I fulfilled the brief we were given in a creative and effective way. I was first of all very happy with my choice of grouping for the project, I worked with a girl called Chelsea who I had previously worked on my project with during GCSE. We are close friends and live fairly close to one another so meeting up to film and work on research and planning was easy and effective to complete. We will most probably be working on the A2 project together as we both how the other works, who can complete different parts of the project most effectively and also where out strengths and weaknesses lie. 
• I believe one of my biggest strengths lied within time management, I kept to a very tight schedule which ensured I complete all of my work within the designated time with time to check all of it and change any parts I was not happy with. This also ensured I completed all of the work to the best of my ability without rushing any of my work and leaving it incomplete. This also enabled us to go back and re-film any parts of the actual final video that we weren't happy with as we filmed it so early on within the year. This concept of time management is something I will definitely be using, if more specifically, within the A2 project. 
• Another thing which went really well was our thoroughness of research, we first looked at many sample blogs of other peoples work, using this we formed a list of all of the necessary research we had to complete to explore the topic fully. This ensured that my research covered all aspects of the brief and allowed me to create a huge understanding of the topic before I began forming ideas for my own opening sequence. 
• The final thing which I was really happy about was the final product itself. Although we could have found better quality equipment, I believe what we had we used to the best of our ability to create a fairly realistic and creative opening sequence. We also tried to use a most experimental genre, this was because many people chose the same genres and we wanted to give ourselves more of a challenge in order to explore the genre in more depth. We may be attempting to do this within our trailer in order to create something more creative and experimental. We also explore our creativity through creating out own soundtrack instead of getting one offline, this was something we thought went really well and may attempt to do it again through this project.

What could I have improved on?

• I believe I could have created more blog posts throughout all of the process, including production, pre-production and research and planning. This would have show more effectively the process of how we got to our final product, I feel as if I should have documented more of the process in order to get to our product to give the examiner more a feel about how I got to the final point. 
• Another thing I believe I could have improve on was making sure that we carried out more primary research, although we used a lot of primary examples we did use a higher amount of secondary research methods which could contain results which are not completely accurate. 
• We did have some time management issues throughout the project, especial when it came to filming or other group work related parts of the project as we both had other subjects to complete work for. This year we hope to be more planned out which will make the process overall smoother and ensure that we get everything done.

Three targets for my A2 coursework:

1. Make more blog posts documenting every decision we make - this will make our process from planning and research to the final trailer much smoother and help the examiner to see our process clearly.
2. Another target is to keep more to schedule, last year, towards the end of our project we were very rushed which meant we often missed out going into the depth we wanted to when explaining or analysing certain aspects of our final product.
3. The final target is to use more mediums to present my research in, last year we primarily stuck  to 3-4 different ways of presenting our work on our blog. This year I hope to discover new ways to present our findings in an interesting manor.