Pre-Production: Project Evaluation

Project Evaluation

This project has been a very unique experience. I have learned al lot from it, enjoyed many of its aspects and picked up on a lot of key skills that I can take forward. I think the hypothetical pre production offered me a unique challenge and I think I have produced something very interesting that fulfils many of my interests and brought out writing and research skills I hadn’t touched on in some time.


What Went Well

I think the biggest positive of this project was that I was able to contact these schools and locations for real, and get to hear their real inspiring stories that fuelled my project. I was able to create a clear concept that worked within the genre and brand I targeted. The work I put in to additional details like scheduling marketing/branding and my treatment I think payed off.

My treatment in particular was vert detailed and this along with my script helped to generate a clear idea of how my episodes would be structured and what would be seen. I took on board everyone’s feedback which aided my series. The effort I put In to my character profiles and storylines helped to make each episode feel unique.

I enjoyed putting together my website and I think that it had clear individual sections that help summarise all the key aspects if my show to a potential audience. I included reference images and material as well as my own additions such as pictured schedules, logo examples, diagrams etc. all of witch added to the representation of my show and allowed the website to feel more thought out.

I also think meeting with Beth Turell this unit provided me with valuable insight and inspiration. Allowing me to look at my project from a new angle and develop content that I hadn’t previously considered. Without her help I don’t think the branding, content and other visual elements of my show (including the treatment and my characters) would be as well developed as they are.


What I would Improve

I think I filled out my production with a lot of detail fulfilling and going beyond the brief I was assigned. But at the same time I do think there are some things I would do differently and improve on were I to do this again. Firstly I think I needed to be more self critical and analytical when it came to certain aspects of my production. I think I needed to look in to my chosen platform and brand with a more analytical eye. Many of my first drafts and initial ideas for things such as titles, episode structures and locations simply didn’t fit with the outline of my chosen genre and platform. I should have spent more time looking in to other channel 4 shows to see how they are marketed and structured which would have allowed me to have a more effective development process. I felt my treatment was very detailed and visual allowing the reader to really envision each episode. But I do wonder if it was too long and looses the interest of a reader quickly.

I would like to have produced more drafts for a script and experimented with different contributors to see if I could have made even more entertaining/informative stories. I’m not completely convinced that my script would fill its screen time effectively and that one half is longer than the other. I think if I were to go back I would have added further crew members since my research said that there would need to be a lot of people involved in a production like this. I may have even added more detail to the crew members I had already chosen.

In this unit I really struggled trying to decide what should go on my website and what should go on my blog. To me it felt like the majority of my work should be displayed on my website to keep all of my package in once place. But perhaps I should have written more about my development process, what I changed, what my initial ideas were, how I acted on the feedback of my peers not just Simon, and in general just fleshed my blog out a little more.

I think also that I underestimated the time it would take to contact and collate all my information from my contributors. This lead to me having to use their websites and my own writing to flesh out parts of their story since they took so long to reply to any of my emails. This had a knock on effect of leaving me to delay other aspects that I could have been working on and obtaining feedback over, as well as making my documentary feel a little more constructed than I would have liked. I think more research in to the fixed camera set up would also have given me a clearer idea about scheduling budgeting etc.

Given the chance I would also experiment with a website builder that wasn’t wix, as I found their site to be rather buggy and unstable. It downscaled a lot of my images and changed a lot of my text causing me to spend more time on it than necessary (time which could have been used to work on more drafts of branding material and research or other profiling, some of which I was happy, with, others I would have liked more time on).


Overall though this unit was a valuable experience that I poured my skills and energy in to. Although the final product isn’t exactly the same as I had first envisioned I am still contempt with it, and will be able to take forward what I leaned.