At A level, my research and planning skills have progressed and allowed me to make more creative decisions, which can be seen from looking at my AS music magazine foundation portfolio and my A2 music video blog.
At AS, I used many things for my research and planning, which I have improved upon and added to at A2. In AS I used Youtube to find the style of music artists to incorporate into my music magazine, therefore giving it a more authentic and realistic feel. I used Blogger to present my work in an easily interpreted way so my peers and teachers could evaluate my ideas and comment on them, thus using web 2.0 to help improve my final piece of work. Within my blog, I used slideshare to share my slideshow presentations on my blog to also let people see what I was doing and to give feedback on. I used Tubechop to show specific parts of footage so that I could interpret the style into my own work and see if other people agreed that it would enhance my work, and to add to my knowledge, I used Wikipedia and Google in the way of the DIKY Triangle by Tim O’ Reilly, I gained data from Google and Wikipedia, extracted information that was relevant to my task, gained the knowledge for example of specific style conventions of a genre of music, and used my wisdom to understand it and use my knowledge within my work to create a realistic looking music magazine.
However, at A2, I used these same methods, and various others, showing a very articulated knowledge of research and planning which allowed me to make more creative decisions. My use of youtube, to gain understanding of conventions for my music video let me have the knowledge to question and subvert those conventions to make my music video more creative and interesting, and I used google and wikipedia turning my knowledge from the previous year of usage of these tools into wisdom as I learnt to incorporate more of my researched knowledge into my music video enhancing it greatly. I used blogger not only to gain feedback, but to see other peoples ideas and plans for their media products and though how the could enhance my own, along with the addition of using widgets on my blog for example the weather forecast to tell me when it was a good day to shoot my video and pictures. The introduction of my Macbook Pro led to even faster and simpler compiling of knowledge through the internet and its simplicity, with the added bonus of professional editing programs to enhance and add to the creativeness of my research, letting me make animatics simply by the use of iMovie to create the effect of the type of music video I was creating.
Web 2.0 was a great influence on my planning and research, as interaction on websites such as Facebook, twitter and blogger all allowed a variety of peers to help enhance my ideas and offer other ones, to broaden my creative skills, by introducing new ways of adapting data and challenging it for effect within specific media conventions, which links into the UGC (user Generated Content) in which ‘amateur comment is now taken as seriously as information created by the professionals’ Andrew Keenan
