Reflecting On My AS Coursework

What were the strengths of my AS Coursework?

• I believe that my AS Coursework went really well last year. I managed to achieve the tasks in the brief effectively whilst being imaginative with my ideas. The grouping of my project was good, as I got to work with Tinika, who came up with a lot of similar ideas to me so it was easy for us to get to work on one solid idea that we both liked. We also only live one bus journey away from each other, so it wasn't hard for us to meet up to film; planning and researching was also an easy task for us to complete. However, we have not decided whether we want to work together this year, as we have been talking about looking into different genre's from each other this year.
• One of my main strengths that I am happy about is the amount of planning that I completed. This is because of the fact that I made sure to take my time going through the sources that I used and made sure that I collected all of the relevant information so that I could use them to plan constructively on what I wanted to do in the production stage. I used the internet a lot of the time  to find out about different genres or conventions, but I also used other blogs of other students' work to gain inspiration on what research they had done so that I could figure out what research I should do as well.
• An additional strength of mine is that I am great when it comes to decision making. This means that whenever me and Tinika wouldn't decide on something, for example the name of our production company, I was always able to determine the best course of action for us to keep pushing us forward in the right direction. This meant that we were always producing and hardly got stuck during our tasks because we were always developing our ideas to help us with the final production.
• The final strength that I will acknowledge is the actual final product itself. Although we didn't have access to the best equipment and editing software, we were still able to make it work with what we had and end up with a B graded piece of work. In my opinion, we used our resources to the best of our ability and utilised everything the correct way. We also chose a genre that wasn't typical such as horror or romance, we tried to stand out and make an original product by exploring our creativity. We used a mixture of conventions to make the task creepy and mask the genre of a thriller. 

What have I improved on?

• One improvement that I could've made last year was planning more in terms of primary research. Although planning was easy and I got a lot done, I would've liked to do more about the genre that I chose. I also could have done more research regarding the feedback of my target audience. This would have made it more evident where the ideas I came up with for the production came from.
• Another thing that I could have improved on is increasing my blog posts. I feel as though I could have documented more of my decisions during the production stage of my task so that all the details were evident on my blog.
• Additionally, although my time management was overall good, there were some points where I struggled, as I had other subjects to study for so work sometimes overlapped. If I had managed everything a bit better last year could've been a bit smoother.

Three targets for my A2 coursework:

• Do a lot more primary research involving audience feedback in order to make the best production that is fully catered to what the audience want to see.
• Plan out every blog post and improve time management so that work from other subjects don't overlap.
• Try not to spend too long completing blog posts and work quickly and efficiently so that I can post as many blog posts that are of a high quality as I can.