During the research stage of my AS media
blog I found that research was a very important part of the course, without the
appropriate research and planning the task wouldn’t follow a set idea and any
work that was created lacked a distinct style, therefore it lost marks. However
I thought that I had improved vastly in my research skills on my A2 blog as I
found that the more posts I did about planning and research the easier I found
designing the work I had create, for example in my A2 Blog I did a number of posts
on researching already existing music videos and posting about what I liked
about them and which aspects I wanted tom include in my A2 coursework.
I found that I
didn’t have to spend any money at all when came to the research stage of my
coursework blogs, this was mainly because I found most of the materials online,
for example on my As media coursework blog I found various different magazine
front covers, content pages and double page spreads on Google images, and as I
have free access to the internet it didn’t cost me anything, likewise for my A2
media coursework blog as I found all the videos and digipacks either on Youtube
or Goolge images again. In terms of accessibility I found all of my research
materials relatively easily, searching for the correct phrases on Google usual
brought up the correct images or videos.
The research and
planning stages of both of my coursework blogs did take a considerable amount
of time, this didn’t change over the two separate blogs, I found that research
also delved into justifying different images I had selected, it also brought
into the matter what worked well on a previous product I what you could use
from it to make your product, for example colour schemes on an NME magazine
could be used on my magazine.
I feel that in
some respects my AS coursework blog did lack in validity with the final product
I had produced, for example for my magazine I changed the style half way
through the course because the previous style of ‘grunge’ was seen as dead and
I would have a hard time trying to fit my magazine to a target market that
didn’t exist any more. Though in contrast to this my research and planning for
my joint A2 coursework blog could be seen as much more valid, as every element
that had been discussed and posted about had appeared in the final product, for
example some effort went into designing and creating some t shirts that each
member of the band wore in the final music video.
I found that the
organization of research in my As media coursework blog was lacking, I didn’t
really know how to use blogger straight away so some of my posts wouldn’t have
labels on them so if I searched for Research on my As blog it wouldn’t come up
with all of my posts. I feel that I have improved this in my A2 blog as every
post I did about research I labelled ‘research’ for example my tube chop edit
research about three different music video types, and my mood board were both
labelled as research.
I feel that the
drafts I created for my as media blog were not up to a good standard, I wasn’t
using photoshop properly and I hadn’t had much experience in designing a
magazine, so when I created my three drafts I had some very poor drafts on my
magazines, so this was a problem when they came back as I effectively had to
create the drafts from scratch to be able to get a better grade.
I felt that the
research I did into the genre of my of music magazine was fairly in depth but
the problem was I didn’t have enough consistent analysis of my genre so the
posts became more of a list of bands then I did research. However in my A2
media blog I found it much easier to research the genre as Rupert and I had
clearly set out which genre we were doing and we created a very detailed and
thought out list of research idea’s on our genre.
