In AS, I created a college magazine and a music magazine. In A2, we are creating a film trailer and a film poster. In these two years, I have developed my research and planning skills.

We did the preliminary task which was creating the college magazine to help us to get used to using Photoshop, a programme that we had never used before. We did a textual analysis and I think that this helped me to plan what the layout of my magazine should look like and how I could make it look like similar magazines by using the same conventions. I used the internet to look at Google images of an example of college and music magazines but one example wasn’t enough and in the second year, I looked at more examples to give me more ideas.

We also had to do the audience research by asking friends through social media what they thought about different music magazines. However, I don’t think that this was a good idea because I didn’t know anyone that reads music magazines so this didn’t help but this was something that I was told to do. I could have done more research by looking at the internet at the reviews of magazines however this still might not have helped me get the research that I needed.

I had to do a publishing house case study and an audience profile. Even though I don’t think that doing these helped me to plan my magazine, they helped me to answer the evaluation questions.

I feel as though I have researched and planned the horror trailer task very well. I watched three different horror films and did film crits to get ideas and influences of what the trailer could be about. One of the films that I watched was Dawn of the Dead and the sub- genre that I chose to do for the horror trailer is zombie so by watching this film it helped me to decide locations, characters and costumes. I also watched lots of horror trailers on YouTube to see what a trailer needed to have. I developed my idea by drawing a storyboard. This storyboard helped me to know what types of shots we were going to use, the duration of the shots and it gave me an idea of what it would look like instead of picturing the trailer in my head. I made an animatic of the storyboard because this helped me to see what the trailer would like with horror sounds added and it was edited so that the timing of the shots would be the same as the actual trailer so that I could see if the trailer looked like it had enough footage and if the trailer made sense. So when we were filming for the horror trailer, we knew what types of shots that we were going to film so this made it easier and quicker for us to shoot as it was detailed.

Furthermore, as a class, we looked at the theory and inferred meanings in horror films as when you normally watch horror films you don’t understand what they are really about so by looking at hidden meanings, it has made us think about what the hidden meanings of our trailers are. As media students, we have tried to challenge conventions of a horror film for example in the horror trailer that my group have made, we challenge the convention of a final girl always being in a slasher horror film by having a final girl in our zombie trailer.