Pre-Production Evaluation

The task we were given was to create a television drama. The pre-production of the task was to write a script, and involved writing a 10-15 minutes section of the script, for any part in the series for the drama.

To start off with, I jotted down my ideas for what I could potentially write about. I wrote a list of them to show how many different ideas I could use. I thought a lot about the types of television programmes I enjoyed and this helped to influence my decision. This helped because it meant that if I was having second thoughts about doing one of them, I could just as easily choose another to do. I didn’t really change genre as such, I knew what I wanted to do in that aspect.

When I had my idea, I wrote it down in a brief. The idea I had chosen to write about was a teen drama, revolving around both teenagers and young adults, and it was going to be called ‘A splitting of the mind.’ I gave a small description of what the show was going to be about, then as I only had to script 10-15 minutes of the show, I decided to write the first section of the first episode.

I next created a questionnaire. This was going to be an important part of the task as it would largely influence the way my script turned out. I asked closed questions so I would get clear answers that would definitely be helpful. Some of my questions included what television shows they liked the most, how many characters they liked to be included and what channel they tend to watch the most of. This helped me choose the type of channel I thought it would be best broadcast on, and what time it would be aired, as both are vital in attracting an audience. When I got my responses I created graphs and charts so I could see clearly the responses and see if they were any patterns or trends in the results. I then wrote a short analysis under all of my results.

I then wrote the first draft of my script. It was very roughly written as I had written the main plot for the episode, but I hadn’t yet researched about the concept of script writing successfully. I would later go on to change it after conducting research about this. All of the research I did was vital to pre-production; I did things like brought up scripts of popular shows, and show that I enjoyed watching, looked at what was common in them, annotated them and then tried to incorporate that in my own draft. I then watched some television dramas, to analyse the key elements of cinematography and Mise-en-scene that have been used in them, so I could then use it.

I then had to choose a focus group, who could answer the set of questions that I wrote about how I could Improve the way I had been writing my drama. My focus group was who the target audience for the drama was (16-25 years) For these i gave open questions, that way they could be more opinionated and that would be a lot more useful to me. This helped massively because, as they wrote what they thought, i could then change my script a lot more drastically than if i had just asked them closed questions, like i did with the questionnaire. I asked three people their opinion on five questions, and wrote an analysis of my findings.
My script was not yet good enough, so i conducted research on the generic conventions of screenplays, and this explained the finer details such as the font, text size and layout. I then had to make a third draft; it had now started to look a lot more like an actual script for a drama now. My focus group mentioned that I should develop my characters more, because they didn't quite add up to how I wanted them to come across when they read it. Scripts are for the actors and the directors, so I had a few people act out bits of my script to see whether it went smoothly or if I needed to change it- due to stumbling on large chunks of dialogue or talking mechanically. This created the fourth draft of the script.
Asking people’s opinions and writing them down was vital in improving my work because if I didn't get a second opinion and use it then my script wouldn't have improved as much as it did. Making sure I used all of my feedback accordingly gave me a successful pre-production.