Unit: 3 Research Techniques for the Creative Media Industries: Secondary research

This is a short 5 minute documentary on a young pianist called Charlie Albright. The reason i chose to put this documentary as secondary research is due to it being similar to how i want my documentary to look such as the use of cutaways and interviews. It is also about Charlie Albright who is also a young pianist just like Lewis. The Style of this documentary is that it has a smooth, rich feel to it  due to the subject of the topic being on a pianist and the documentary representing the style of music the piano creates such as classical etc. This is how i want my documentary to feel.    

Unit: 3 Research Techniques for the Creative Media Industries: Secondary Research

This is a video of Lewis Peart who i am making the documentary on. This video represents what the the documentary will be about and what the main focus of the documentary will be on such as what it is like to be a pianist and what he aspires to be in the future.

Unit: 3 Research techniques for the creative media industries: Secondary Research (Qualitative)

http://www.chethams.com/about-chets

This is relevant to my research as this is the school the person my documentary is on is attending. This page is about the history of Chethams school of music and gives me the overview of what the college provides and how many people attend and what age students attend from. This would be helpful in my research as it gives me an insight into the college. This research is secondary, qualitative research.

Chethams school of music provides their students such as Lewis the abilities to progress as a professional pianist and create opportunities to perform at huge events such as BBC proms in park and broadcast for BBC 3.

Unit 3.1: Research techniques for the creative media industries (Essay)

Understand the nature and purposes of research

in the creative media industries.

In the following essay I will be discussing the advantages and disadvantages of a range of research techniques used in the media industry. To achieve this I will in detail talk about Types of research, methods and sources of research, and purposes of research whilst using sources to explain my points.

There are different types of research to collect data, these include Primary and secondary research in which primary is done through methods such as observational research and interviews due to primary research being done by the individual researcher and secondary research being done by looking through other researchers work and collecting your data through literature and internet research. The advantages of using primary research to collect data is that you can rely on the information you have collected as you have done the research yourself and you do not have to worry about the information being false due to it not coming from a another source. Although you do not have to rely on other peoples research, the disadvantages of primary research is that it only ables you to work with one set of data, whereas using secondary research you work with several sets of data for your research as you can read other researchers work, McQueen and Knussen (2002, pp26) states “The scope of secondary data will often exceed what the individual might achieve on their own”. This shows that gathering secondary research will allow the individual to achieve more than they would by themselves, as they would collect more data from various sources.

The advantages of secondary research is the data you collect could potentially be by a reliable source and be accurate which you can use in your research especially when looking at audience research on websites such as RAJAR and BARB which shows viewing figures for TV shows for Audience research which is needed for shows to see how many/what type of people are viewing, Also when using secondary research techniques the researcher has the advantage of using more than one set of data due to them being able to look at other peoples work, to create an overall conclusion to their research, whereas the disadvantage of using secondary research is the sources you use could possibly be out of date and could be wrong, Also the information you look at could be biased and one-sided due to it being based on peoples opinions therefore not on fact which could affect the research as it could be wrong.

The other two types of research is qualitative and quantitive, Qualitative research is text-based research, such as interviews and literature research by using books or the internet an example of qualitative is the NRS (National Readership Survey) website that provides researchers with the information about the ‘social grade’ which shows the type of social class people are associated with concerning the job they have.  The social grade can be read and used to see what type of people are watching and is a form of secondary research. The purpose of using qualitative research such as the NRS social grade is for Market research, this type of research is to see how they can attract a certain audience at a certain time in the week/day. Market research is also to see what competition there is an example of this is prime time on a Saturday night between ‘Xfactor’ and ‘Strictly come dancing ‘, Researchers compile statistics over a period of time to see what is popular but not necessarily what is better. Another method of collecting qualitative research is interviews due to the interview being a face-to-face ‘conversation’ where the interviewer asks relevant questions to the interviewee about the topic being researched therefore it is qualitative and primary research. The advantages of qualitative research is the researcher is able to get peoples opinions and go into more detail an example of this is a quote by May. T (2002, pp123) who states “the interviewer is freer to probe beyond the in a manner which would be appear prejudicial to the aims of standardization and comparability. Information about age, sex, occupation, type of household and so on, can be asked in a standardized format. The interviewer, who can seek both clarification and elaboration on the answers given, can then record qualitative information about the topic.” This gives the information that using research methods involving qualitative research has the advantage of the researcher in gaining more elaboration on the information they have been given such as on answers the interviewee has given. Another advantage of qualitative research is that you are able to get a wide sample of peoples opinions for example IMDB which provides people with reviews from the public on various films, This could be useful to get a wide sample of opinions and see what people like. The disadvantages of using qualitative research is there is a probability that the person you are interviewing could give you false information which could affect the research you are doing, Another disadvantage of using qualitative research is when you have collected your results it will be harder to evaluate as there is no numbers to put into charts and graphs. The best way of obtaining statistics is to use surveys which are easy to present in graphs.

 

Within qualitative research there are several different methods of obtaining data. The first being interviews, The advantages of using interviews is the interviewer can control the interview and get the information they need for example if the interviewee goes off topic then the interviewer can put the interview back on track, This is useful when doing a structured interview when the interviewee starts to drift off topic or when you want a specific answer, An example of an interviewer is Jeremy Paxman who interviews politicians, Structured interviews tend to be more strict and aggressive due to the interviewer wanting exact information these type of interviews are used in job interviews and more formal interviews. Other forms of interviews include semi-structured which give the interviewee more time to develop on their answer and give their opinions but the interviewer still has control over the interview, As May T (2002, pp123) states “These types of interviews are said to allow people to answer more on their own terms than the standardized interview permits”. An example of an interviewer who uses semi-structured interviews is Louis Theroux who allows his interviewees to expand on the questions he has given them. The final type of interview is an un-structured this is where none of the questions are pre-arranged before the interview; an advantage of this is the interviewee would give a more personal response, as it is more conversational. A disadvantage to this is the interviewer could potentially lose his pace and ask the wrong question which could lead to the interviewee to not answering and be time consuming. Quantitative research is numerical based researched such as statistics. An advantage is you get   straight answers and facts from surveys; a disadvantage is you can’t develop the information you get or get peoples opinions.

Production research is to look at risk assessments to see if there is any risk involved, call sheets to see who can be filmed, and reces (Look at a place before filming). This is to see if it is possible to film at a location with the correct people and equipment. 

Bibliography  

May. T (2002) Social research. Open University Press, Buckingham    

McQueen and Knussen (2002) Research methods for social science, an introduction. Prentice Hall. London.

Production Research (Types of edits)

The types of edits i used are Match cuts, Jump cuts, and Cut aways.

The first edit is a Match cut the way this is done is  by filming several shots of a person walking down the stairs such as the first shot  which is a low angle of Aaron walking down the stairs from the top, the next shot is of Aaron's feet through the stair railings so that it 'Cuts' The shot up into to sections, Then the final shot is of Aaron walking down the last steps then off them. This is called a match cut due to the actions in the separate shots matching up to one another. A match cut also makes the sequence more fluent.

The next edit is a jump cut the way this was created was to film one long shot of the person walking towards the camera then cutting it down using the razor tool to create the jumpy transitions between the shots.

The final edit is a Cut away which is shot cut in half by using another shot such as the one in the third video of me waving, then back to the original shot. The way i did this is to cut the first bit of footage down using the input and output buttons to where i wanted it to start and finish then do that with the second bit of footage and finally placing the second bit of footage over the first clip just after the first wave to look as so there is a reaction.