Question 1a Practice

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.

My production was informed and influenced by research that I conducted during the planning stages at the beginning and also throughout the creativity of my production. I researched numerous things in order to create my music video such as previous music videos made by the artist William Control as well as other music videos of the same genre. This enabled me to find out more about the conventions of a music video, but especially ones within the genre I am focusing on which is electric. I also used a number of aspects in order to conduct my research starting from using the Internet to gaining audience feedback on social networking sites. My research carried out and how this developed over time to help create my music video will be discussed throughout this essay.

Firstly, I used the internet to research previous music videos other A Level students have made in order to see the standard and quality needed to create one. I used Youtube to do this and by using this form of research it developed my ideas over time. This is because my ideas for the music video kept changing and once we finally came up with an idea we kept adding new things to it. For example, at first I chose to have the video in colour, however, after watching the video through I decided to change it into black and white. I chose to have it in this way because after researching the conventions of electric music videos I noticed a lot of dark colouring was used. This made the video look more effective and it fitted well with the genre as it is quite eerie, using colour did not give it the effect I wanted it to have. I used iMovie to edit the colour of the footage, using this programme was useful as I had already became familiar with it during my AS course. Therefore, I did not need to worry about learning to use a new programme I was not confident with.