Research and Planning Essay

I developed my research and planning over the course of 2 years by understanding the formula of magazines and how they are edited and structured when looking through all the really good magazines to enhance the creativity that I come up with. My understanding of the roles of each convention do and how most are required (e.g. masthead, main coverlines, straplines) has become better over the period of time.

For my AS preliminary task, I had to do a college magazine. I had to look at some college magazine on the internet to get an idea of what to do since this was my first task. It required basic skills. such as putting the dominant image in the middle, did each convention and so forth. I didn't do that much because at the time I didn't learn that much so this limited my creativity - I couldn't do what I really wanted to do with the lack of knowledge in terms of editing at the time.

Later on, I did my music magazine. I learnt more about Adobe Photoshop and InDesign and how they operate. This allowed me to make a magazine which was way better than the college magazine as I can now portray my creativity better. I cropped out the model in the image and copied it to make the masthead appear like it is on the brick wall in the background. Also, the I changed the image into black and white by typing minus 100 on the saturation panel as well as grayscaling it on Photoshop. This was inspired by the NME magazine with the UK Rapper Kano on it; on the double page spread, the whole spread is black and white including the dominant image. This was a good effect because it shows the gritty and grimy feel of London since it is such an urban place. On InDesign, I made sure all the conventions consisted of some sort of black and white combination to further emphasise on the theme. Also, I used the same font because I wanted it to be quite minimalist. I developed an understanding of Photoshop/InDesign which allowed me to flourish my creativity as it now has deeper meaning behind everything I do. But it is limited in terms of creativity; I only had to do a music magazine and nothing else.

After this, I am now creating a horror film trailer. Even though my AS music magazine has developed it still had some limits. In a horror trailer, I can now do much more in it than a magazine because so much subliminal messages can be implemented. When researching and planning, I've stumbled upon a lot of trailers such asthe Conjuring 2, Friday the 13th 2009 and many more. There's much more to do for a trailer. My group and I have to consider the location, the costume/makeup, sound design, shotlist and editing the trailer with the sound design as a whole. So creating this allows for more creativity to be shown and portrayed. Editing a trailer is much more complicated than editing a magazine so that means that we have now developed our skills over the course. But it still has itslimits. We are required to do a HORROR trailer, not an action or romance film trailer so it can't be abstract.

To conclude, over the course of 2 years, I have went from creating a basic college magazine to a horror film trailer which requires way more thought into it since so much needs to be considered in order for it to be a really good trailer. In addition, the software we have to use for a trailer is much more complicated (Final Cut Pro) than InDesign or Photoshop. But the more indepth it is, the more creative you can get so it opens doors for innovative content.