Reflecting Back on AS

So it's our first lesson back after the exam period and it's just about time to start the A2 course so I thought the best thing to do, in order for me to progress significant amounts is for me to reflect back on the skills I learnt last year and how different things affected the production of our film.

The first thing I thought about was the impact that new technology to the media department had on our overall product. The newest piece of equitment we had the use of was a new HD camera which enabled us to get the best quality shots possible. With the use of different size lenses (35mm, 50mm and 75mm) it meant we were able to have a more advanced way of filming as we were using equitment similar to that used in the proffessional film industry and the new camera meant we could get the clearest shots so our film was the best quality it could be. We also had the use of final cut pro, the editing software available for apple computers and that used in the film industry. This helped us to get a good quality of editing as movie maker and other more amaeteur programmes don't have the same effects and 'slickness' that final cut does. It also helped editing to become easier, especially in the uploading process, as we had a new converter that meant we didn't have to keep rendering the same material everytime we changed something.

I then looked into the new terms and concepts I had learnt during the year and this was a huge amount so I have decided to include only a few of, what I feel, to be the most important terms and theories for me. The first one is the idea of digitisation that made a huge contribution towards the production of our film. This is the conversion of previous analog material to digital formats for example before they would have had to edit all film reels by hand but now due to digitisation we are able to edit them on the computer making everything quicker, easier and more cost effective for the producers of the film. It has helped us directly by allowing us to put films up onto YouTube which we would not have been able to do before so helping more independent film companies and producers make films. Another word we looked into last year was convergence and the fact that many film makers are now making use of this idea when creating their media products. It is the idea that various different types of media are combining into a single media. This means that newspapers and magazines are now able to be viewed on the internet and videos and the internet are now able to viewed 'on the move' because of phones and tablets. This is a huge step for many people in the media industry and one that helps not only advertise films and such but also gives you the ability to watch them across media forms. When producing our film we also looked into a few different theories that we could include in our film. This included Vladimir Propp's theory of narrative that said that all the characters in a story can be put into one of the 8 different character types. We decided to use this idea when making up our story and it worked to help us to achieve the effective clip that we did!

Thirdly I looked at the different skills I had developed from the beginning of the course up until now. The main skill I had achieved was the use of the software, Final Cut Pro. This was a programme that, at the start of the course, I had never seen before yet alone had a go making my own film with it! This  meant that we had to do a lot of research (looking on YouTube for tutorial clips and going online to find what other people had to say about the software) and do a lot of messing around with it. After a couple of goes on it, especially after doing the preliminary task, I was starting to feel more confident with it and I now feel I am able to use this programme to quite a high level.

Finally I revised the different influences we got that meant we were able to make the film as this was going to be an important factor when making music videos in A2. We used the idea of the feather at the start of Forrest Gump as a McGuffin in our film, Shrek with the fairytale book at the beginning and our main themes and storyline was based around the same ideas of A Cinderella Story. As you can see we had many influences when making our short 2 minute long clip and this is the type of thing we will have to concentrate on when making our music video. Overall I think I have taken a huge step in my media knowledge about the media industry from the beginning of Year 12 to now and will be able to use all these skills in the production of our next task, a music video.