At the beginning of Year 12 I had to complete an AS
Preliminary Task for creating a college magazine. The goal of this exercise was
to simply display that i had the skills to create a magazine by following the
basic conventions of a magazine. This exercise was in no way creative as
nothing new was created, as a creator I simply copied something that already
existed to prove to a moderator that i had the skills necessary to create a
music magazine. During this period i had only just started to learn how to use
the software needed to create the music magazine so my means of channelling my
creativity weren’t fully optimised. This meant that my creativity was greatly
limited by my lack of skill.
When making the AS media music magazine it was obvious that
for the research side of things we would have to look at a wide variety of
music magazines. Seeing as i was looking to make a hip-hop magazine I had to
look at a number of other hip-hop magazines to see how the basic conventions
were used and to understand the conventions that are specific to that genre.
This was very important as it helped my
magazine’s stylistic choices when it came to things such as house style or
colour or position of the masthead. It was this understanding that i gained
from looking at the many examples that helped me understanding why you would
choose black instead of red for text colour for example for body text. The
level of knowledge gained from research allowed for me to develop my magazine
creating skills.
When creating my A2 media film trailer there were a number
of things that had to be factored in to Research and Planning. For example to
create a horror trailer I first needed to know a great deal about the genre.
This is why I did Horror genre research that allowed me to understand what went
into the editing, sound, mis-en-scene, etc of a horror film. I then applied this knowledge by looking at a
number of iconic horror characters and seeing how this knowledge applied to
each one of them in their respective films. It was this information that
allowed me to create a suitable treatment for the horror trailer. This
treatment was filled with many of the codes and conventions when mentioning key
scenes of the film, making fir a better piece of production that would cater to
fans.
My planning skills have developed greatly from the
production of my music magazine to the production of my horror trailer. This is
likely because my research skills have developed more which underpins the
planning process. With greater knowledge of the conventions that I need to
include and each of their purposes I can plan a better final product. This may
for example be the rule of thirds when creating a front cover and that the
purpose is to position different aspects of the magazine at the different
points that the eye would go to first. More research was done in horror
audience research in A2 and I was able to create an even more appealing horror
magazine as we had asked actual people from our demographic what features they
liked and included them in the appropriate parts of the magazine taking into
account the already learnt information on the rule of thirds.
As a post modern media producer it is very difficult or
almost impossible to come up with something original. However this doesn’t mean
that it isn’t possible to be creative in this era. You can make use of already
existing text and bring them together to create something new. This is known as
intertextuality. It’s the synthesis of something new from the reworking and
remodelling of the pre-existing.
