Answer to number 2

Introduction:

Real texts are examples of media products that have been produced by other people in the 'real world'. These can be anything from films to music to posters or artwork and many more. These can be used to gain ideas of how products should be produced or organised which can be helpful or in some peoples eyes, detrimental to the creativity of someone producing their own work.

Paragraph 1:

The advantage of using real texts as a basis for your own work in the research and planning stage of production is that you can receive inspiration and ideas as to how to make the most effective media product possible. This can be things such as looking at conventions of genre for example to find what key aspects need to be in your media product to have maximum effect on the audience.

Paragraph 2:

On the other hand, using real texts to help create your products can stunt your own creativity and promotes copying and plajizm which can mean that the producers own ideas are blocked and stopped from going into the final product. This can mean that they end upo creating a very similar product which limits the audiences pleasure as they have seen the same, or a similar, thing many times before.

Conclusion/ Evaluation/ Summary/ Final Bit:

When creating our own media products as part of our A level course, we have taken the time to look into similar products to that which we are producing to gain ideas and inspiration as we ourselves had little experience to use to build our own ideas. For example, when creating our music poster and digipak as part of our Music Video Project, we researched into other bands' products and also into the conventions of the media products. This helped with discovering the contents of the products such as including tracklistings, record label, artist and many others. This meant that we could create the best product possible for our audience which was the overall aim of the task.
Therefore, we believe that the use of real texts has offered us many diverse creative opportunities throughout our media career and we shall continue to utilize them when producing and creating future products.

Tom Halkyard

Throughout our media studies course we have been set a number of tasks and challenges which have all, in their own way, required an element of research and planning in order for it to be completed at the required level of quality. This is the case with tasks such as researching genre conventions which we had to do as part of our music video project, thriller project and opening sequence project so we could create a more convincing and fitting product for the song we chose or for the task criteria. We utilised important sources such as youtube and wikipedia to find out about our chosen genres so that we could choose to either follow them or challenge them in order to create our desired finished product with the desired effect on the audience. Another example is when we chose to research existing products to find out how our product should be and what it had to include in it. This had to be done when creating our ancillary products as we needed to know what contents are traditionally used on music posters and on digipaks. The type of contents included: Artist Name, Album/ Song Title, Track listings, Record Label, ETC. Planning is also a key part of completing any task. It means that you can better manage your time, get a bigger picture of the whole project and more easily complete tasks that are planned for. Throughout our whole time at Long Road, we have been publishing web blogs at all the stages of the projects we have completed so we had a record of the work we have done. This also allows us to plan for different stages of a product so when it comes to the time we need to complete it we are better prepared and know what to do. I have come to better appreciate the need for research and planning in a project as it makes tasks easier to complete in the time given and generally leads to a finished product of overall better quality.