Evaluation of Research

Research was a major part in my Advanced Portfolio Production. Because I hadn't produced any sort of video before in my Media Studies course I had to do a lot of research into what features were key. I used multiple websites and previous students work to help me with my own because I like to learn from others experiences. One website that was very useful when doing research into what I needed to incorporate in my own Advanced Production was mediaexemplar.com. It gave me the oppurtunity to look at previous A2 work and understand how the music video was to be produced.

Much of the audience feedback I recieved was positive and any criticism I recieved on my initial ideas I found very helpful because I asked people that would be most likely to buy the album/magazine I was planning on producing. This was more effective than asking young children or older adults because they aren't my target audience and although the praise would have been nice, the feedback would have been irrelevant.

One task carried out for the research part of my Advanced Production was magazine content analysis, specifically on album adverts. I was able to acquire 50 music magazines dating from 2005 to 2009 all with a vast range of music artists featured inside them. Because these magazines are solely music magazines, the adverts they contain are 75% music/album related. Through this research I found out that the majority of music album adverts take up half a page, I figured this was because on the bottom half of the page there was the magazine advert and on the top half it featured upcoming tour dates, an album of the similar genre or an atricle relating to the artist advertised.

The research I did for the music video included finding a track to use that hadn't been copyrighted. I was able to find such a track because I was able to get my hands on multiple demo CD's which means they are allowed to be used on individual projects but also TV opening credits, film soundtracks and advert themetunes. I chose a track called "Flower Fields" which was very convenient for me and it fitted perfectly with the style of video I was aiming to produce. I wanted my video to feature lots of scenery and flowers. The track has a slow introduction but soon picks up into a repetitive beat however, not too repetitive to become boring. It is only 2 minutes and seconds long and therefore doesn't have the time for it to get dull to list to or dull to watch. On the video's I looked into throughout the research stages I noticed that towards the end the tempo of the transitions pick up. This is a feature I decided to ue in my video because I was able to use multiple segue's and other techniques learnt throughout my study of film in Year 12 media studies.