Q1A (Research and Planning)

Explain how your research and planning skills developed over time and how those decisions contributed to your media productions outcomes. Refer to a range of examples in your answer.

In year 12 we made a film opening, ‘The eZ Life’ and in Year 13 we created a promotional campaign for our artist iSO. This was a music video supported by a website and a digipak. As a digital native I was used to consuming products like music videos and websites but had little experience of research and planning before.

My research in year 12 consisted of secondary research. Researching my genre and conventions for the film opening. As I had little experience in year 12 I did not do a great deal of primary research. However in Year 13 with my skills having developed I used primary research a lot more. Software like survey monkey to gain feedback on my productions which I believe made my productions much better after acting on valuable feedback.

Secondary research was still important in Year 13 as to conform to Hip Hop genre conventions I had to research other artist’s products like digipak and music videos. This research was vital, in that, without it our music video would not have conformed to Hip Hop conventions. But research was also very important to create the website as I had very little idea of what other Hip Hop artist websites looked like and what their purpose was.

My primary research largely consisted of using survey monkey for both AS and A2. However my primary research improved from AS to A2 which resulted in better products. For example at AS I used survey monkey for audience feedback on my film opening. I got about fifteen responses which was not really enough to gain a great deal of constructive feedback. Although survey monkey contained tutorials on how to use it which made it relatively easy to use my questions were not great, which limited the use of the responses. However at A2 I made much more direct questions with selected responses so all of the answers were relevant and I amassed over sixty responses which meant the feedback was much better and more detailed.

I also used Quicktime survey at A2 as I found that survey monkey did not include all the features I wanted. Quicktime surveys allowed me to present information much more effectively and meant it reduced the time it took to sort through all of the data which allowed me more time to partake in creative actions like editing and filming.

Overall I feel like my research and planning skills were good at the start but have still massively improved throughout my Media Studies. Especially my primary research skills which improved massively throughout the last two years.