Through out the first year of A Level Media I acquired new skills that have proven to be very useful for making the various media products that we needed for our coursework. We used a variety of programmes and websites to help us research, create and promote our film opening and everything we needed for it.
Research and planning:
For this stage we mainly used a lot of websites and internet browsers to build up enough research to support our film opening. For example, Google was the main internet browser that we used to easily access other websites such as IMBD, Youtube and Warner Bros, this allowed us to research existing film openings that we could compare to our own work, and as soon as we chose to use Warner Bros as our film institution we started on researching the company and horror films that they have produced. We decided to get as much research as we could to support our ideas and we thought that the film Scream was most like our film opening but not completely the same.
We added all of our research onto our blogs with various images to support through out, however we also created other resources such as a storyboard of our film opening and a prelimanary task video which allowed us to practice a few shots that we could use in our final piece. We also then filmed our storyboard as we thought this would be the easiest way to upload it onto our blogs and it was also a more interesting way of doing it as we were using a different media to just a photo image, and we were able to add an audio clip in the background of it which also enhanced our skill of using different media techniques.
Filming our video:
During this stage we were able to film each clip separately and test out which camera shots would work best within our film opening to create as much suspense as possible for a horror genre. We found that this was very useful to us as we became more educated on the various shots that were the most effective for a horror film opening, for example a point of view shot allowed an audience to look from the victims and murderers point of view, and the murderers usually saw them watching the victim.
Editing our video:
This stage was the most educational to us as the majority of the group had never experienced editing software before or edited a video. We used FinalCut and iMovie to practice our editing skills before moving on to editing our clips to make our final film opening, which some of us found challenging but I feel that by practicing it allowed us to gain more confidence with using the programme. When it game to making sound tracks and music for our final piece we used GarageBand which again, not a lot of our group had experienced using, so we practiced using the programme before actually creating our final soundtrack. This also improved our confidence with using the programme.
Overall experiencing various new programmes has allowed us to build our confidence on using them on bigger projects that are to come in A2, such as our film trailer and research and planning for it.
