Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for productions developed over time.

During the AS Media piece of coursework, we had to conduct a vast amount of existing Music (preferably) genre magazines, as we were soon to be creating on our music magazine.

If I’m being honest with myself, looking back I was quite naïve when it came to drawing influences from successful products already on the market. I was actually looking at a current magazine, and seeing if there was anything I could do differently, I’d prefer to focus on the negatives, for instance, if I saw a magazine title, and I liked the colour scheme, but I wasn’t a fan of the font, I’d focus in on the font, and look for way’s that I could be different, and improve existing products, whereas what I should have done is, focus in on the colour scheme, which was a positive of the magazine, now I don’t just mean blatantly just copying it, but rather looking for ways that I could incorporate it into my own work. Luckily, during the coursework, with guidance from my teachers, and more logical thinking from myself, I was able to start drawing influence from the positive features on the current music magazines, rather than focusing in on the bad points. After all, they are on the shop shelves because they have been successful, and ‘popular’, especially in design.

 As this was something that I had learnt during the AS coursework, it really helped me from the beginning of the A2 coursework, because one of the first tasks that had to be completed was analysing current music videos, therefore when I was analysing videos, I looked for the positive points, instead of the negative, to see what I could adapt to make my own work better. For example, I would look at camera angles on music videos, digest what I’ve watched, and then look to see what would work in my video, in contrast to looking at what doesn't work too well, and not using them, which relies on being completely innovative, rather than using my initiative.

Also, throughout both pieces of coursework, I have tried to keep my research subject/genre orientated. During research, peers who were also working on the coursework, some would look at magazines of a different subject, for example, football or fashion magazines, whereas I just focused in on looking at music magazines, and more in depth than that, ‘Indie’ magazines, because that’s that genre I was following and I wanted to draw inspirations from magazines that had sold to my target audience.

Similar to the previous point, this helped me when it came to creating the music videos, I was once again using a ‘Indie’ genre, therefore I looked solely at ‘Indie’ music videos, because likewise to the magazine, I wanted to create inspirations that had appealed to my target audience.