Explain how your research and planning skills developed over time and how these decisions contributed for our media productions outcomes. Refer to a range of examples in your answers.

Research and planning is a way of aiding towards the final production. During my time from the start of AS media till now I have developed a wide range of skills towards carrying out extensive research and planning. The difference between my AS media and my A2 media show the how I have developed in carrying out research and planning.

For my AS task as a group we had to create film openings, before we started producing our film opening it was important that we carried out planning and research. I started by reviewing different film openings and reviewing the different titles and when they appeared in contrast with the scene cuts and changes of sound. Our genre for our film opening was thriller/horror so it was very important that the film openings I viewed were relevant to this genre. Reviewing different film openings such as “The Pact” and pulling them apart title by title was very important for what the titles actually included e.g. Costume Designer. My A2 task was to produce a cross promotional media package for an upcoming artist known as “C.DOT”, this would include mainly the music video, a digipak and a website. To find out our target audience which we would market C.DOT towards we carried out primary research which mainly included online surveys using software which was called “Survey Monkey”. We were able to email this to large numbers of people simultaneously and then produce the feedback into different formats such as graphs to assess the data.

Secondary research was much more in depth compared to the primary research that was taken especially for my AS film opening. My research skills were at an average level before starting AS, one of the tasks for example at AS was to watch unseen films and identify the genre just from watching the film opening as it was important for us to replicate this in clearly representing our film genre being horror/thriller in our film opening. To make sure I could be consistent with this I would research different thriller drama films, however when searching for the films to research from due to my inexperienced research skills I tended to just go for the films that I preferred not the ones which would aid my knowledge. This was a big change from this to carrying out my A2 research for especially my website. I wouldn’t just go for my preferred artist I would look into the different characteristics which C.DOT would produce on camera especially with fashion and match this to an artist best suited to him. This would allow me to get a high understanding of the genre of Hip-Hop/Rap which C.DOT was involved in and the different sub-genre that are involved.

Different music videos and editing techniques which we could implement in our video was vital in when researching and planning, as if this was carried out correctly we would be able to produce a high level video.