- Music Video analysis; Artic Monkeys - When the Sun Goes Down, Maccabees - No Kind Works, The Maccabees - Precious Time, The Vaccines - If You Wanna, Bombay Bicycle Club Magnet, Beastie Boys - Make Some Noise.
- Mood Board of artists from a similar genre.
- Examples of other texts - Analysis of album artwork.
- Analysis of Magazine adverts and posters.
- Market Research - Looking through top 40 and download charts.
- Anthony Goodwin - formats of a music video.
- Read various reviews on music video's.
- Watching music channels in an attempt to gain an understanding of current music videos.
AS Coursework Primary Research:
- Double Page Spread Analysis.
- Contents Page Analysis.
- Magazine Cover Analysis
- Magazine Moodboard
- Fonts analysis
- Magazine Pitch feedback
- Posted examples of articles, written by others e.g. NME
Expense and cost:
when researching areas such music magazines (AS Coursework) and music videos (A2 Coursework) the expense and cost is almost always free. The internet was the basis for almost all of research throughout both my AS and A2 research. The expense of AS research was however slightly more expensive than my A2 coursework. This was mainly due to the expense of buying magazines for research purposes whereas with music videos i simply viewed them for free using Youtube.
Accessibility:
As youtube is so easily accessible it was much easier and less time consuming to find examples of music videos. It was much more difficult and time consuming to find good quality examples of music magazines which were specific to the genre i chosen.
Accuracy:
throughout both my AS and A2 coursework i tried to use accurate facts and figures. I didn't use figures at all in my AS coursework and the only example i think of in my A2 coursework was when I used the download chart and top 40 singles chart in my research. This information was undoubtedly accurate as the figures from the download chart were taken from iTunes and the top 40 chart was taken from the radio one website. During the audience feedback, the main source of feedback was teachers, friends and classmates. We had no feedback from people that we were not familiar with, this could mean that some of the feedback, particularly that from our friends may be slightly biased, although we trust professionals such as our teachers to give honest feedback and not to be effected by relationships with students.
Validity:
no piece of work is completely original, and this applies to my work to. My AS coursework took some elements from other magazines, for example including the 'F' from the title of the magazine on every page was a technique i noticed when looking at Vibe magazine which often placed the V behind the main model. Other than this my magazine was relatively original. When looking at my A2 coursework, the whole video was based around the 'Shuffle" music video by Bombay Bicycle club, although there are many differences between our video and Bombay Bicycle Clubs the inspiration for our video was taken from this and he concepts are very similar.
3. Organisation and Research:
Before my AS coursework i had never used Blogger before, and I found it difficult to organise and label my work effectively. This resulted in me having to label much of work long after i had completed it. During my A2 coursework i was much more familiar with blogger and as a result i have labeled and referenced my work much more efficiently, avoiding a backlog of labelling.
4. Planning - Pre-production requirements.
for both my A2 and AS coursework i produced one draft before handing in the final edition of my work. During my AS coursework my drafts consisted of a 3 pieces of work, a draft cover, contents and double page spread. During my A2 coursework we simply produced a draft music video, the difference between my pre production work between AS and A2 is the quality. The quality of my AS drafts was fairly poor and i had to make massive changes and completely change the whole magazine, whereas my A2 draft was fairly high quality and although it still required lots of changes it was intially very good and the changes were merely improvements.
Organisation of time, personnel and equipment:
Throughout all of my coursework (AS and A2) i have always worked extremely hard to meet deadlines as this is crucial in allowing time to complete each stage of work. If one deadline is missed it has effects on all remaining deadlines as you now have more work to complete before the next deadline, and it for this reason i made sure i completed all my work on time.
Organisation of personnel was a extremely difficult and also frustrating, particularly during my A2 coursework as there more people and equipment involved. We produced schedules to make sure that our work was complete on time, however due to each member of the bands different commitments we did not stick to this schedule. The people that featured in the video were our friends and helped us out for free, there was little benefit for them, because of this we tried as much as possible to film around their other commitments and not to be too much of an inconvenience. Although we did not stick to our original schedules we did produce the work on time and were fortunate to have such helpful and generous friends. Also as teenagers communication does not come naturally and we found it difficult to communicate with each member of the band as they were often at work/school, this caused considerable frustration. We overcame this by communicating using different methods in order to gain a faster response e.g. twitter, Facebook and SMS.
5.Organisation of planning materials:
During my AS coursework i did not really follow any real plan, because my drafts scored so poorly i was simply working off teacher feedback. There was a very different story when working on my A2 coursework, we were constantly referring back to our storyboard and schedule which we had produced. We did not stick to these strictly but we used them as guidelines and made sure we did not stray far from them, because of this our work was always under control and we were confident with what we had produced throughout the entire course.
6.Presentation of Research and Planning:
In my AS coursework i used programmes such as SlideShare, Animoto, Scribd and Prezi to present my research and planning. This is a similar story to my A2 coursework, the only difference being that i had more experience of using these programmes and therefore i was able to create more aesthetic work.
7.How your Research and Planning has informed your practical production:
A large chunk of our A2 research was carried out on indie/alternative music videos, this was because we had decided to produce a music video which would fit into this genre. During this research we recognised a number of traits which were present in indie/alternative music videos, this research ultimate had a large effect on our final product as our video was inspired by many indie/alternative music videos e.g. Bombay Bicycle Clubs - Shuffle.
