Questions on research and planning

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

Good planning and research skills are essential in media, at the beginning of my AS media year I was unaware of just how important they were, however throughout the year my skills developed. When beginning our music magazine it was important to find out what music our year group were into as our music magazine was aimed at people 18-30, to find this out we created a questionnaire, we did find out some very useful information that helped us plan our own ideas, however reflecting I think it would have been better to ask a variety of the age group, I now see this as something that I could do next time. There are two types of research, by now we had already completed the primary research, so for the secondary research we used Google to search for NME and KERRANG. I found that by using this type of research it was very beneficial in creating our drafts as we were able to get a good idea of structure, layout and fonts. Since doing the planning for our music magazine my skills have developed considerable as I am now starting my A2 project and am able to adapt these skills to what I am doing now, I have already started my planning and research and have a very clear direction as to where I am going.
The planning was just as important for our magazine, there were many things that we had to consider such as the location and when the equipment would be available. As I was working in a group one of my team members strengths was organization and this was something that I was able to develop over the year and now I am able to carry this through to my A2 year. When creating our music magazine we also did many drafts of our ideas so that when we came to the final draft we could converge all of these ideas together, this is something I will continue with this now as it is vital that my music video is very well thought through.

2.) How did your knowledge of digital technology aid your research and planning skills throughout the pre-production of your AS and A2.

We began our music magazine by researching into different genres, YouTube became a vital part of our project as we used it to look into music videos and reviews of music videos, as I was already well established with YouTube I was able to easily research into the videos. When we had researched all of our ideas the next step was to find somewhere to keep it, I was aware that you could set up blogs, however I was unaware of the site Blogger, however this was something that became essential in our everyday work, blogger was a brilliant way of keeping our research as well as keeping it organized. Facebook and my mobile became very important in our planning and research as well as we used them to contact our other group members to organise times and meetings as well as any new ideas that we had. They were essential in contacting our actors that we were using for out front cover, so that everybody was clear as to where we were meeting and what time.