Practice Essay - Section A, Question 1a: Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology and evaluate how this contributed to your research and planning.

• Intro
• research into real media AS and A2
• research into target audience AS and A2
• planning AS and A2

Throughout the course of the two years I think my skills have developed in Digital Technology in Research and Planning. For my AS project I had to make a music magazine, and at A2 I had to make a teaser trailer along with a film poster and a front cover of a film magazine. Firstly I will talk about how my research into real media texts using digital technology helped to develop my skills through to A2, and then talk about target audience research and the beneficial planning process.

At AS for research I looked at real media texts. Since the genre of the magazine, music, was already given to me my research was quite restricted. There was not much variety into what we could research as influences. As it was just magazines we were looking at as opposed to in A2, there was not much digital technology needing to be used in the research. Through digital technology I looked at existing music magazines, going onto the actual music magazine's websites such as NME and print screening the photos of the covers etc. Some magazines have an on line version, like Echoes, which helped me because I could then get a picture of not only the front cover, but also the double page spread and the contents page, which sped up the process of research and planning. I feel at AS I did extensive research into real media texts, combining looking at micro and macro elements to then maybe convey in my own magazine.
At A2 there were more mediums to create so that meant more research into real media texts needed to be done. Using Internet sources like YouTube and IMDb helped me to research into, whilst at AS I could only look at music magazines. Since we got got to choose the genre of the film for A2 there was much more lee-way into what we could research, for example we looked at comedy, action and thriller genre trailers to analyse. Giving us the opportunity to see which genre best suited our ideas.
Researching into target audience at AS I created a questionnaire and did the find my tribe quiz. I used resources such as the Internet buy looking onto Google onto what would interest the chosen age group of the target audience and complied images together. At A2 the target audience research was somewhat more advanced. We did even more extensive research into the find your tribe quiz, and also created a questionnaire and used Microsoft Excel to create graphs and uploaded those to blogger. This was to show the results in a more graphic way as opposed to just a paper questionnaire. We also created a moodboard, this one on just the results from the find your tribe quiz, and what we would imagine the target audience would use or watch for example the Transformers film and the thriller Taken, and use Twitter and Facebook social networking sites to communicate with their friends.
The planning process for both years were quite dissimilar. For AS I made a calendar to track what I was going to do and how much time it would take me. I also planned the costumes and the location based on talking to my models, asking them to wear an outfit that was quite 'edgy', we organised through text and emailing over Facebook. This enabled me to use digital technology whilst planning. I took photographs using my camera of the location, costume and the models themselves, describing them in a little bio.
At A2 there was more to plan. When planning the location and props we took photographs and really explained why we chose to include the certain props, such as the knife and the choice of location because it went well with the treatment and script. On the computer I also created a timeline on what we were going to do through the process of filming and post-production so that we kept to the deadlines that had been set. Storyboarding was a big part of the planning process. We used a template off the Internet with empty boxes for us to fill to plan out what we were going to put into the trailer. We did a couple drafts to get it perfect and for all the timings to be right. At first we just had writing for the storyboard to describe what was going to happen, but after some consideration we thought it would be more effective and look better to draw in images of what was going to happen on each scene.