Research Proposal

 

Overview of Final Idea

My final idea for the film that I will be doing for my final major project is a five-minute video about how I have dealt with my Grandma’s death and what it’s like trying to get over it still nearly two years later. The idea of the film is to portray to the audience how hard losing a close relative can be and that it does get easier. It is meant to be an empathetic film.

 

What are your six research methods?

My six research methods are as follows:

• Primary Qualitative 1 (Questionnaire)

• Primary Qualitative 2 (Social Media)

• Primary Quantitative (Survey)

• Secondary Qualitative 1 (Youtube)

• Secondary Qualitative 2 (Short Film)

• Secondary Quantitative (Statistics)

 

Why have you chosen these research methods?, What do you intend to find out from these research methods?, How will these help you with your film idea?

Questionnaire - I have chosen the questionnaire to use as my first primary qualitative research because it will allow me to get a better understanding of how my audience will react to my film because they will be the audience that I will be presenting my film to. They can also give an accurate set of answers to how I can imagine most people would react to my film. The questionnaire is going to include questions that will be based around what setting I should base the filming in. It will also include questions about how closely I should refer to other short films similar to mine. Another reason for doing the questionnaire is that it will allow me to get honest feedback from my peers and maybe some suggestions.

Social Media - The reason I have chosen to use Social Media as my second piece of qualitative research is because having the opinions of people outside my audience that are not my age or the same age as the rest of my audience will give me some different and experienced people's ideas - e.g. my other grandma is very spiritual and can help me understand better what tints and colours convey certain meanings. It will be asking what kind of aspects of my idea will be the ones that I will actually be able to use and will be most successful in making my film more effective. This will help me to know what parts of my final idea are realistic and which will be too difficult to conduct. It will also help me to see the points of view from a person who may not be as affected by the sorrow in my film due to being older and more experienced and how I and make it so they also get hit with the sadness that is intended.

Survey - I am doing a survey to get a more broad range of opinions on whether including such sad ideas in my final film is actually a good idea. The survey is going to be published into the Facebook group (SUAC Media L2 2016/17) and will include questions about the topic of my film which is grief and whether it has affected my audience to see if an empathetic film will do as I intend it to do and upset my audience. At least once I have some answers from this survey I will know whether my video is really being presented to the right people and if it would be more effective to a different audience, for example, my family.

YouTube - I am going to use YouTube to my advantage in my research because I will watch some similar short films and see what their audiences responses are like. This will also potentially give me some more ideas that I could include in my final film. This research will also be very useful to me because the majority of the audience for YouTube are the same sort of age as my own audience. I have found a few videos already that are very similar to what I am going to do so I will use this kind of videos to find out the reactions from this audience.

Short Film - There are many short films that try to infer loss and grief and what I will do is take these properties and reuse them. Using a short film as a form of research is going to be one of the most useful research methods to me because I will be able to analyse the properties, reviews, and characteristics of the makers and how they successfully make their audience react the exact way in which they want them to.

Statistics - The website that I will use to get my statistics is Rotten Tomatoes. This is because these reviews are written by professional critics who review all the latest films and TV shows. This will, therefore, give me a good idea at which films were successful and why. They also give new films and TV shows a rating out of 100 which is useful to see which ones have a good story. This, however, can be inaccurate because the critics sometimes have completely different opinions about films or TV shows, for example, Netflix released a new Marvel TV show called Iron Fist and it has been rated 19%, but from what I've seen, most people really enjoyed it.​