ONLINE RESEARCH
POSSESSION The website that was most useful was the BBC website, where various radio dramas were freely available to listen to. This enabled us to listen to dramas both old and new that weren’t available to listen to for free anywhere else. The BBC website also made them easy to access and the hassle of downloading didn’t hinder us because they could be played straight off the web page. Actually listening to dramas instead of just reading about them on Wikipedia meant that we could take a greater amount of inspiration from other radio dramas. I have learnt to conduct aural research as well as visual research. I used Google more when I was researching for my newspaper advert and magazine feature. Google images brought up search results that I wasn’t searching for and opened up the research process.
Pembroke Gardens: radio drama I used a range of different sites such as the BBC for the IPlayer- this was to build up knowledge of radio drama’s so that we could make an informed decision about what genre to take on E.g. The Archers which inspired us to crate a soap drama. Listening to other dramas on the IPlayer gave us an insight into the actual forms and conventions of a drama in practice. We also used YouTube as another source of drama’s in general to influence our storylines . We picked our drama/soaps such as East Enders & desperate housewives to draw inspiration from and picked out particular clips from the dramas to form storylines from. We also used some blogs dedicated to radio drama’s , particularly as a timeline of radio drama so that we could build up a knowledge of the history and its significance in the past to present day and put it in my coursework blog. We also looked up older dramas such as the Twilight zone and War of the World’s as comparison to radio dramas of today.
Pembroke Gardens: poster and feature Poster: used the BBC site and Google search to research old posters; some particularly to our type of drama, eg. The archers poster had a location shot on their poster/advertisement and this inspired one of our posters. Another poster from The Archers featured a cast shot which we used as inspiration for some of our posters. Feature: We used websites such as www.radiotimes.co.uk to gain inspiration for our features. We used the different conventions of features from this magazine as this would be the type of magazine our feature would be published in. We followed the typical outline of the features (main headline, main image, sub-title, article and maybe some smaller images). We also included our poster in the feature to promote the drama. We all wrote an interview with the characters of our drama as this is also one of the conventions of a radio magazine feature.
Abduction We used radio dramas and films as research for our own drama. Although visual, film crime/thriller’s share many conventions with radio dramas of the same genre. This made creating our story very easy, as we could take influence from films too. With the use of the BBC iPlayer, we were able to listen to a wide variety of radio dramas and genres, this allowed us to understand the specifics of each genre.
Jack Parker Magazine Cover/Contents/Feature With my magazine, my initial research came from physical magazines because I read a lot of music magazines. Researching online however, allowed me to compare the difference between magazine’s printed and online versions. This enabled me to gain a broader idea of each magazine I was looking at for inspiration. It also showed me that magazines need to be even more visual and eye catching to compete with the online and in most cases free, versions.
My magazine research included some layouts from the actual ,magazine websites which had previews of what their covers looked like over the the years. This was so I could draw some kind of inspiration as to what I wanted my font cover to look like Also I used the colour schemes from the websites such as Q magazine influence my range of colours and shades on my magazine relevant to my music genre.
Lisa West: Music Magazine Cover/Contents/Feature I was highly influenced by ‘SuperSuper’ magazine. The design for my magazine was inspired by this magazine as I used lots of bright text, different fonts, the same kind of logo and different images on the front cover, aswell as on the contents and feature. The feature had a bright and colourful background with different shapes which was also inspired by ‘SuperSuper’. However, I challenged the conventions of this magazine by changing the genre of music, therefore changing the target audience. On line magazine sites really helped my with my research and also the production of my whole magazine. I also used sites such as www.nme.com and www.kerrang.com. These magazine sites gave me an idea of the kind of magazine I wanted to produce, as I didn’t want to create a magazine that conformed to these kinds of music magazines, which is why I came up with something different to the usual music magazines on the market today.
Music magazine: Various. By going online to research magazines, I was able to look at back catalogues of magazines similar to my own such as Kerrang! and Total Guitar to see how they have developed over time to suit the new audiences. The websites for magazines often give a deeper insight into the story, as they are not limited by word counts and page restrictions, this helped me to understand what is vital to a story and what can be ‘removed’ in order to meet the guidelines.
Music Magazine After researching music magazines online, I realised that in order to appeal to my target audience, it was imperative that I paid attention to the layout of my feature.