Thursday 15 March 2012

Detail how your understanding of the importance of good research and planning skills developed throughout the pre-production of your AS and A2 coursework




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.

I felt that goog planning and research allowed me to design and create a much better product, for example in my AS media blog both my planning and research were weak and this eventually let me down we it came to designing my magazine as weak analysis of magazine layout had led me to create a magazine that didn’t really fit with standard magazine formats. 

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