Ms Robertson

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 coursework?

(AS) In the progression from our preliminary task to the main task I learnt how important our organisation was and that it had to be precise and efficient in order to make an immaculate magazine. In the preliminary task we distributed the work amongst ourselves and did the work by ourselves and then came together at the final stages and put all the bits together. This may have been the reason for our magazine suffering as it was quite simple and basic. Our planning skills developed as we went into our main task. We still did some parts separately but we also spend a lot of free periods and lunches bringing it all together, making adjustments and raising any issues. In order to plan our time successfully we created out own checklist that helped us asses what we had and hadn’t done. This allowed us to check our progression and set targets for the week so we could achieve certain things in a set time and keep up to date with deadlines. I have understood that organisation and distributing all our tasks evenly between our group allowed us to get all the work done and also fairly. My understanding of the importance of research has developed as I’ve learnt that making something like this in the media, it is important to plan and research. Without researching past covers it’s extremely hard to create a new one. Researching and asking questions helps to cut down and decide on exactly what needs to be done and what is needed. Four our main task we had to do a photo shoot. We had to add this extra part into our organisation. I personally learnt setting specific dates to meet targets helped to keep everything efficient. For example we booked an exact date for the photo shoot. Also the people we had used we had thoroughly briefed them about clothes and props as we had researched about the connotation of colours and had purposefully considered the colours and style of clothes unlike in the prelim task where we never considered these factors. We learnt from this and it developed my understanding of research. I have developed good researching throughout the process as in the prelim task I hadn’t considered much but in the main task I researched everything in great depth. One way in which I did careful research was when I emailed 3 music magazines to ask them about their niche audiences and how to appeal to them, what style and age they aimed at and some further questions. This allowed me to gain more information on how institutions use house style and layouts to attract their audiences and allowed me to further understand what appeals to the audience for certain music genres.

(A2)

2 How did your knowledge of digital technology aid your research and planning skills throughout your pre production of As and A2 coursework?