Essay on Research and Planning

At the beginning of my college year I did not have many creative skills to use towards my first college magazine which I produced myself with no extra help. I had already had experience in creativity with using cameras of smart phones but apps such as indesign and photoshop I was not very advanced at. For the college magazine also I did jot do any research ans planning of textual analysis and drafting, which effected the end result massively as I was not aware of the conventional layouts or colouring therefore it did not match existing college magazines. Also, since I did not do any drafting my first draft was my final draft and I had no practice so the magazine was not professional looking. However, for my music magazine there was a bit of research and planning completed so, I was able to gather conventional components that I could include/copy to make the magazine more recognisable to the chosen genre which was pop. For example, pop music magazines have bright and bold colours, the genre is very feminine so there is generally a female used in the dominant image. Moreover, for this magazine I was able to do drawn and a rough digital version to help me plan so that my magazine could succeed a lot better in its aesthetics and how it is viewed by the public readers. However, even though I was able to draft and understand the typical layout of this genre, I did not fully understand why parts of the layout were placed where they were. After this AS year I transferred into A2 and began working on a horror film trailer where I specifically started looking at sub genres, this immediately shows the development into my skills as I now had to look into different sub categories of horror and analyse and understand the conventions and what they represent, e.g the masks in slashers are used to represent the enemy within an antagonist. What's more I am now using the concept of intertexuality where I am able to make the trailer my own which broadens my creativity limit. As for the planning, we also made a short teaser trailer over the summer to see what skills we already had and to be able to learn from our mistakes and improve from them. I am now able to understand what makes a trailer scary and what does not, by watching my summer trailer compared to real and current trailers that help show contrasting differences. In conclusion, I believe that I have ultimately grown a huge amount in the development of my skills and creativity which is majorly due to the amount of research and planning carried out within a task. It is proven, the less research of knowing set conventions you must include in specific media products and the less amounts of drafting and practice completed for a task, the less successful in meeting the criteria your product is; which in all, highlights that creativity is limited by your understanding, knowledge and practice of a task and can be proven by the examples of work I have analysed above starting with my college magazine towards the end to my final horror trailer.