Research within the media is extremely important as it allows you, be you an aspiring film director or screenplay writer, to understand what audiences are looking for. In this unit I am likely to be using research for a promotional video project regarding a local museum. To complete such a task research becomes a necessity and by doing so you gain valuable information such as which style of film making attracts the largest proportion of audiences and how it will affect your work.

There are many different sources for this information and one largely available source is the internet. It is no mystery that many critic reviews and ratings are available on the internet as more and more websites regarding different releases are appearing and are largely backed by critic reviews and ratings. In using the internet for this information you are opening yourself up to numerous different opinions critics and movie goers have over certain films. This, at times, can be unreliable as you can get mixed opinions where one group of people enjoyed the movie and another group disliked it. This is where you can grow confused as to where you can formulate a conclusion and so you result to using different methods of research. Another source of research would be books; books are a primary source for information and at times can be more reliable than the internet.

Another source of information would be through surveys. Surveys are largely used for collecting information especially within the media as they are opinions collected from mixed groups of people therefore if your results come back and are largely containing the same answers you know that what you were looking for in some way worked.

Primary research is the method of finding information yourself, this could be through creating either a survey or questionnaire which looks to groups of people for answers and then collecting the information you have set out to get and coming to a conclusion through your own methods of research. This method of research is more likely to be used before a project is put into development as more information is gathered and can help the people behind the project make it more suitable for their audience.

Secondary research is the method of using online tools and external resources to gain information on your chosen subject. This is often a useful method as it does not require endless amounts of work in pre-production if the method was used within the media and often answers are easier to find and collect together. Secondary research could also mean you collecting information from books and developing your own ideas through your findings. At times, primary research can be more suitable as you receive precise information and it is given directly to you.

Qualitative research is when you ask questions which will be followed by an open ended answer. It is a form of research which allows opinions to become information. This form of research tends to appear through journalism when an interviewer will ask questions to a celebrity or someone well known within the news and leave space for them to comment so that this can be quoted and taken note of. This is useful in terms of media and film as when researching to find information about what audiences expect from a film of the same genre as your project you will ultimately find information which can, although not direct, make you aware of what is expected from your product.

Quantitative research is when you gather information which could be translated into a graph or table; something which displays numbers rather than opinions. With quantitative research you receive straight forward answers from your audience, such as yes or no, and therefore spend less time gathering together similar answers and trying to come to a conclusion. This type of research does not always produce full results as sometimes they may come out biased and you may have only addressed one specific age demographic or gender demographic with similar opinions towards films.

Normally, people will tend to refer to primary research as a more reliable form of research as you become the person who asks the questions. Qualitative research would also be reliable as you would be given information along with details about whatever it is you are focusing on. All these methods of research are available for people looking to extract information and put it forward for a project however sometimes it is up to the person themselves to decide which of these methods of research are most helpful and reliable.