Report Post 1 - Introduction

For my research topic I chose to gather information on movie maker and director M. Night Shymalan. I chose him as my topic because he is the director of the "Last Airbender" movie that is currently being filmed. The film is based on the animated series "Avatar: The Last Airbender", of which I am a fan.

To begin my search I applied two broad and probably well-used techniques for expanding my basic knowledge. First I put the name of my topic into Google search and looked through the results; second, I searched for my topic on Wikipedia. I didn't expect to find any specific information at this stage, only an idea of places that I might look to find things. While doing this I was keeping in mind the specific pieces of information that I had decided I needed. I'll list them here, not necessarily in order, but as they came to me.

Foremost was biographical information, I wanted to find a detailed, but not excessively complex biography of M. Night Shyamalan. As well as this information, I felt that I should also find a list of all the films that he had been involved with and some basic details about them. Next, I needed to find some visual information on my topic; some pictures and perhaps a moving image (video). I wanted to find an interview with M. Night Shyamalan or something similar but i felt that perhaps this would be difficult to find. Next, I wanted to know if there was an official website concerning my topic, if he himself had one, or if there was an "official" third party site. I felt that finding such a site would help me a great deal with finding other information.

These were the three basic things that I wanted to find, any additional pieces of information that I found while searching for them I thought of as bonus information. There were difficulties and problems with each that I will outline in a future post.

This concludes the introduction to my report; In my next post(s) I will talk about each of my desired areas of information, give samples of what I found and talk about the problems and difficulties I encountered.

- Piff