For my AS coursework I used many different types of research and planning to give myself as much information as possible before creating my final product. By doing this it gave me as much depth and broadened my knowledge of creating a magazine cover, contents and double page spread. I used primary and secondary research in my research and planning. My Primary research consisted of creating a preliminary magazine, images that inspired me, mind maps, colour testing, animoto presentations and font sampling . This showed my technological skill in presenting my ideas and it made clear the steps of development in my ideas. I researched magazines that fitted the genre I was aiming to create - and those that didn't - so I could have a clear scope about what conventions were needed in my magazine and what weren't. I went out and bought magazines such as Billboard, Complex, NME, Q etc. to have first hand evidence of what conventions typically fell into each genre. After I chose to do the genre of 'pop/mainstream' I did gained feedback from my peers/teachers etc. to which ideas/names/fonts/colours they would most expect to see in a pop magazine; as having a strong interest in fashion and being an avid reader of Elle/Vogue I also got feedback on incorporating the 'fashion' element into my music magazine - as I was desperately trying to stay away from the 'smash hits' stereotype of 'pop' magazines.
For my secondary research I used other magazine covers as inspiration, album artwork, music artists websites, magazine websites, music channel websites, articles, magazine contents pages and double spreads. As I had a reasonably specific idea on how I wanted my final work to look I produced mock contents/covers/double page spreads and presented my ideas in a pitch to receive feed back and establish the ideas that I was producing. I elaborated my secondary research by analysing covers/contents/double page spreads from a variety of different genres; analysing their colour palettes and layout gave me a greater idea to the conventions of each genre, and allowed me to define the style I wanted to use.
With the knowledge of research and planning bought through from AS, I used the same 'style' so to speak towards my A2 coursework. As we worked in a pair myself and my partner decided to split the work in two, so we both knew exactly which items of research and planning we were doing and could therefore put more detail in to what we were doing. By being organised in this way it worked well as we could both focus more and combine our ideas. It also gave us as a pair more scope as we both have slightly different interests so it allowed us to broaden our knowledge and give us more ideas for our music video. For our primary research we created mind maps for our band name/album name, set up a twitter feed and did a lot of questionnaires in order to get a 'realistic' sounding band name. Using the internet made these tasks easier as there is infinite inspiration if you look in the right places. Secondary research we used was album covers, existing music videos, existing band names etc. We watched a lot of music videos from a variety of genres in order to gain as much depth as possible before storyboarding our music video. To present our ideas we used similar mediums as AS such as animoto, flickr, scribd, prezi and slideshare.
The second part to our A2 coursework was the ancillary task of creating our own digipack. As this was separate I used the same strategy to my AS coursework; by researching and analysing existing texts from different genres gave me an in depth idea to how to present my work, what images to take and how to lay my text out.
By comparing the skills used from AS to A2 I would say that it has allowed me to develop and strengthen my research and planning skills to a level that I felt I could express my skill accuratley without feeling that technology is restraining my trains of thought etc. Having a blog to organise all of my work proved very useful in both years as it allowed me to create a 'house style' that matched with my coursework. It also allowed me to easily gain audience feedback and edit my posts if they needed improving - this was especially useful when creating draft versions of my coursework as I could get as much feedback as possible before continuing. Also as there is no limit to how much you can post on blogger I found it useful as I felt as if there was no constraints - something which stresses me out when writing up posts.
By A2 I had realised the importance of good research and planning, and by doing this it gives you a platform to move on and create your music video/magazine/ancillary text. I also knew from AS that the more research and planning you do - the better, so ensured this was the case for our A2 coursework.
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