Planning and research essay

Planning and research. 

When planning for my work, I used a range of research methods. I’d say that I used secondary research more as I was influenced by existing texts in most pieces. For the magazine, music video and digipack I had to familiarise myself with the conventions of each of these. For magazine examples, I looked through my own existing collection of music magazines and then at examples on the internet. I used a similar approach to the digipack, I scrolled through my iTunes and looked at album covers to draw inspiration. I had a fairly big collection of album covers but again I searched the internet for existing examples. When researching music videos I used mainly secondary research, in that most research was done through watching videos on youtube. The main primary research I used was through audience feedback, I found this very helpful. If I liked my work then I would be happy, but I was producing it for a wider audience so other’s opinions helped me in seeing what I needed to improve. I also trusted the opinion of my teachers who themselves had good knowledge of existing texts in magazines, music videos and digipacks. Most of my research was very useful, it was also good in that it didn’t cost me anything or I had no trouble accessing it. 

In terms of organising my research, blogger was the main factor. This allowed me to keep a journal of all my work and was easy to find examples that I had posted through the labels I had put on them. An element of blogger that I used more effectively at A2 was the use of labeling, which I had too as I posted many different examples of music videos in particular. I used websites such as Scribd to let me post directly from Word or Pages, so that if I had analysed some research on those programs I could post it without having to try and convert it into the blogger posting page. There were some problems that I encountered throughout my coursework with blogger, for example sometimes youtube videos could not be embedded, which wasn’t too much of a hinderance but an annoyance to not have all examples I needed in one place. 

Once I had finished researching the existing texts, I had built up a knowledge and began planning. This is a process I used in all pieces of work. I had to produce drafts for each piece of work, for my magazine I focused on the layout and images as I could put the article itself in on the final draft. I played around with photoshop to come up with 2/3 of each section; cover, contents page and double page spread. From audience feedback I saw what was the most effective layout or image and this factored into my final piece. I did a very similar thing with my digipack. For the music video, however this was a different process. Filming and editing a video takes longer than making a magazine or CD cover on photoshop. For the draft, in our group, we decided to try and make our video as close to a final draft as we could, so we put a lot of effort into our draft. Our audience feedback was very positive, this made us feel like we had made a very good decision to go full-out for the draft instead of messing about and risking relying on a final draft that we wouldn’t have had as much to time to improve. Rather than have to go through the hassle of re-filming, we only had to re-edit parts of the music video as we had planned. 

The music video was the first time that there was multiple personnel needed. This meant we had to be a lot more organised than in AS work, where we had to organise with one person for a photo shoot. We had to go through relative hassle in making sure everyone was available at the same time, we had to change 2 people in the band as they were simply too busy to film for us. Luckily we had some good replacements. 

Our music video featured 2 different types of shots, ones where the band had instruments and ones without. This meant we had to come up with a way of scheduling the shots, we did this so that we didn’t shoot in the order of the storyboard but in an order so we could be time effective. We filmed at night, we didn’t have to worry about losing light but we did have to potential problem of the weather changing, as there was heavy rainfall in the days leading up to filming. This would have been disastrous as it would have ruined continuity for the whole video and been dangerous for the electronic equipment. 

Overall, I think I used one critical part of producing the work, research and planning to good effect. Even though we had to stick to a schedule made by our teacher which included research and planning, if I was to try and produce a piece of work like the magazine, digipack or video I made I would probably use similar research and planning methods. I think the planning, for the music video in particular, was perfect and allowed us to comfortably produce a music video in the time allowed and to a good standard. The use of drafting is a skill that is very useful, particularly combined with audience feedback as you can improve your work on someone else’s opinion, rather than just your own.