Project Background Research
Taylor Swift has always been an inspiration for me ever since I can remember. I think a lot of it is because of how I see myself in her and her music. Because of this, I found myself often incorporating her or her music into my various projects. For example, I chose to do my media criticism ten-page paper on her career so far as it is fascinating and something that should be analyzed.
However, when originally determining what I should do for my capstone project at Valdosta State University my first thought was not to make a documentary about Taylor Swift or anything Taylor Swift related primarily because I thought it would be crazy of me to do. While that thought may still be true, my plans changed after I talked to my dad about my capstone project.
My original idea was to find a local artist and do a documentary about them and their musical journey as an artist. I was beginning to have a ton of issues in getting something together for it and began thinking through other ideas. Some of these ideas included doing a mini travel show involving food or focusing on various cities’ histories and exploring what makes them special. After playing around with the ideas further it became clear that these ideas were just not the right fit for me as I was not super passionate about them.
Coming up with a solid idea that is feasible and something that I am passionate about was difficult to determine. I genuinely just felt like I was in idea jail since I was struggling to come up with any ideas. Given this, I called up one of the only people who has helped me solve numerous problems and get through so many situations, that person being my dad.
Now, with this particular conversation we were discussing some of my previous options, and felt like he could tell I was just not happy with the ideas I had so he began suggesting ideas. This is when he suggested doing my project over Swifties, The Eras Tour, and the Ticketmaster situation.
The reason why he suggested this idea to me is that he knew how invested I have been in the whole Ticketmaster situation for the Eras Tour and how I am a Swiftie. I mean, I was literally in the queue when Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan presale just froze to where no one could get tickets.
After taking some time to think about the idea, I realized how it encapsulates many of my interests including Taylor Swift, music, concerts, traveling, and the legal side of media. I mean it seems like the perfect project idea for me. However, before going forward with the project though there is some background information that I need to find.
One of the first things I needed to determine is if something similar has been done on this topic already. From what I could find, the closest thing that I could find about this topic was a few news stories about it. Since there has not been much done on this topic I feel that I am good to proceed with this idea.
From there, I had to determine how well the dates of The Eras tour line up with the semester and tentative schedule set by my professor. This was not too hard to do given that the dates for the tour are set which meant all I had to do was compare. The next step was to research the Ticketmaster situation and potential interviewees. While researching the Ticketmaster situation was relatively easy, particularly because I dealt with it. By doing further research I got a clearer perspective on the specific issues I want to focus on, but this meant I definitely would need Swifties to interview in order to get their perspective and insight.
Determining my potential interviewees was much more difficult, surprisingly. I believe researching my potential interviewees was so difficult because of a few things. First, I first had to narrow down potential candidates. With so many Swifties out in the world, I knew the people I choose to interview for this project would need to be active members of the Swifties online community. This helped narrow the selection quite a lot, however, there were a few more factors that I used to further narrow it down. This included going through their social media accounts to see if they ever did a fan project, a Taylor Swift giveaway, if they have impacted the community, and or have a large following.
From this, I eventually found a few people that I think would be good interviewees for this project and then it was just a matter of reaching out to them to see if they would be interested in participating in the project.
Overall the project background research was not too difficult to complete, but rather just tedious. However, I know that all of this work will pay off by the end of this project.
