Research and Planning Key Findings

• Best centres encourage balance of the two elements: 
• Must do a mixture and a clear balance of both...need to make sure you are planning as well...not just doing what you are being told.
• Create sense of journey
• You need to show your progression. 
• Doing 1 thing really well DOES NOT make your work good. BE CONSISTENT
• Candidates reflect upon the production and impact during the process
• Don't just analyse the front cover: say what you have learnt from it. What does this mean for your construction?
• Retrospective planning to be avoided completely- clearly obvious
• Teacher- led class work was often the only form of research for some candidates
• You need to do research beyond that of what is done in class. 
• If we teach you the basics of analysis using an NME cover for example you need to choose a cover from your own genre. You also need to make sure if we do NME and you're doing NME then you need to  do an extra piece of work. 
• BE INDEPENDENT
• Specific research into the actual products being produced is needed - music magazines and Videos
•  Look at the specifics of everything:
• Fonts
• titles
• layout
• Edits
• Audience needs more consideration at this stage rather than just in the evaluation
• Need to consider who is the audience?
• What are the background?
• Not just a questionnaire!

Direct from the Exam Board: Something to consider!!!

The practice of students giving out questionnaires and putting all the returned examples in their evidence has been discouraged for a long time. The main problem with this approach is not the survey method per se but the limited nature of the questions and the claims made for the responses. For example, asking ten fellow students their favourite genre of film, finding that seven out of ten say ‘horror’ and then using that to justify making a horror film opening as a result. Audience research is more productive if it addresses the following:

·      What do real audiences consume?

·      Who are the specific audiences for particular products?

·      How do media industries target those audiences?

Those questions require research of a different kind to the local questionnaire method; initial research online looking for data about the industry students are dealing with, such as box office figures for films or circulation figures for magazines would be a good starting point. Part of research involves looking for examples of how marketing works across a range of media- for films this includes considering posters, trailers and their selling points, for example.

Later audience research should be considered in a series of stages, each involving formative qualitative feedback. So, for example:

·      Pitching the product to the rest of the group and taking feedback, noting the responses from this and deciding how to act as a result.

·      Showing early drafts of the work (such as an animatic of the storyboard or a mock up front cover) and asking some carefully framed questions about them to get a sense of the audience’s understanding of the product rather than just a measure of whether the audience liked it.

·      Taking peer feedback at later stages and then again on the finished product; asking things like “can you tell me what happened in that sequence, what the relationship between the characters is and what do you think will happen in the rest of the film?” to look for audience readings of the work. ‘

These approaches can be presented in a variety of ways- video extracts with framing commentary from the makers; audio, written. All would help move away from the pie chart of responses model which tends to be fairly unproductive.