1a. 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 production developed over time.

Research into real media texts was an essential part of constructing my productions over time. For my film opening in my first year of the course I began by watching a great deal of film openings from my chosen genre. I watched drama films which were recent such as 'Public Enemies' (2009) and 'The Godfather' (1972). After constructing a ten-frame analysis of 'Public Enemies' as a point of reference I was able to see the common conventions of this type of film. This included a variation of shot angles, something which I used in my final production.  I posted these findings onto my blog for my own personal reference.

     The internet was also a crucial part of my research stage. I watched the film openings of previous students to see what I would be capable of making on a low budget myself. I also used the Internet Movie Data Base, this enabled me to cross reference films of my chosen genre and measure their success. I was able to obtain royalty free music for my film opening on RoyaltyFreeMusic.com, this allowed me to use music without confronting issues with copyright.

     My research also extended to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, these allowed me to keep up to date with the development of social media and measure the level of interest from people who would be faced with my finished product.

     Research was also a key component in the construction of my Music Video in my second year. I began my research for this by watching numerous music videos from my chosen genre (pop) on Youtube. I went on to complete another ten-frame analysis, except this time it was in much more detail and far more relevant to my final piece than my previous one for the production task of my first year. Instead of analysing simple facts such as colours and scenery, I looked deeper into them. As music videos are more artistic I looked for symbolic meaning behind the objects, scenes, lighting and perspective of the video. By trying to make more relevant comments about each frame I was able to notice patterns in the shots used. Most shots would return to the type of shot they had began with. For example a sequence may start with a mid shot, then go to a close up, before returning back to a mid shot. This observation made me much more aware of how sequences worked and allowed me to use this sense of regularity in the construction of shots in my final production.

     I also created another preliminary task for my second production. This was far more developed than my preliminary task from my previous year in which I demonstrated a sequence of shots in an improvised situation to use techniques such as shot reverse shot and cross cutting. Although this task had allowed me to practise new filming skills I found my newer technique used in my music video preliminary task far more applicable to the further creation of my final task. This is because my second attempt involved me replicating the opening sequence of a real music video. Instead of blindly trying to create shots from a textbook I copied them from a real product, Taylor Swifts 'We are never ever getting back together' video. I found this much more helpful to the creation of my task as it challenged me much more and enabled me to film something which I was aiming to create instead of just separate tools which I hoped to use at some point. The filming techniques were much more difficult to create, but this was mainly down to the lack of professional equipment I had. We had to improvise with our low budget filming equipment in order to try and replicate the high standard of shots and techniques used in the real video. At first this proved challenging, but we were able to gain the desired effect after some practice.

     The internet was once more crucial to the research of my music video. The  use of it developed greatly in our second year. We went on to use online tutorials to learn how to gain new transition effects and develop our editing skills for when we had finished our task. By teaching ourselves how to use our software in a more effective manner we were enabling ourselves to stretch the boundaries when we reached our editing process. Something which we did as our transitions included a kaleidoscope effect, animation and inverted overlaid images over our shots. These skills would never have been able to be used in our video if we had not researched how to better use and understand the workings of Final Cut.

     I also began using social media much earlier in our research stages. We used Twitter, Facebook and Deviantart to advertise and create a following for our video before we released it. I did this by giving regular updates on progress, releasing sneak peeks, and sharing my preliminary lip sync task. This was useful as I was able to gather interest for the video before I had finished and released it. I also used the social networking sites to release a series of polls in order to evaluate the age of my target audience and their expectations for the video. This helped me to stick to relevant conventions whilst planning my video and not stray too far from my themes and what my audience wanted to see.

     I blogged in further detail in my second year, using a more varied and creative manner of presenting my ideas such as post-it note films, whiteboard talks and Prezi presentations.

     Despite the development and success of the planning of my products I also faced a degree of challenges in these first stages. For my film opening I found that the drama genre is extremely broad and is often paired with other genres such as thriller and horror. This made it extremely difficult to find films that were of the drama genre alone to analyse due to the sheer amount of overlap. With my music video the challenges were also present, but varied. My research and planning was much more involved in the creation of my music video as I had a clear idea of the locations I wished to use and had to gain permission from the National Trust and Bekonscot model village to film in their locations. In some cases this took a great deal of time phoning and chasing different people in order to get permission, fix filming dates and sort out risk assessments. We also had to gain permission to use the music we had chosen by our unsigned artist, this all took up a great deal of time and restricted the development of our product at stages as we often had to wait on the response of other people before being able to continue further in our planning and production route.

Each stage of my planning is recorded on my blog. This collation of my planning processes demonstrates the sheer amount of time I have spent researching and planning each step of my production. Without these stages and the use of other media texts I would not have been able to create my task.