Research and Planning Essay Response

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.