Development Grid - Holly Stone

MEDIA STUDIES AS/A LEVEL, TRANSITION WORK –EVALUATING YOUR SKILLS DEVELOPMENT THROUGH THE AS YEAR

As part of your A2 exam next June you will have to explain how your production skills as a Media practitioner have developed over time. This involves detailed explanation and evaluation of your skills at AS compared with skills at A2, and is about you as an individual, not the group as a whole. The exercise below is designed to start the preparation for this question, by asking you to evaluate your own skills at the end of the AS year; you will then revisit this later in the year when you have finished your A2 portfolio as part of your exam preparation. Each one of the skills areas listed in the left hand column could be the focus of an exam question next June.

What skills have I developed this year? What are my strengths and weaknesses? What should I work on improving next year?

Fill in your column

Skill area	Your evaluation of your own skills in this area – strengths, weaknesses, and things to work on. Be precise, giving examples or evidence  (eg on camera, discuss particular techniques such as focus pull)	Your teachers’ evaluation
Your use of Digital Technologies: how skilled are you in these areas? This includes your use of camera techniques, your use of blogger, your use of prezi (if you used it), the internet (used for research for example) final cut editing techniques, garageband, photoshop (if you used it), social networking (if you used it)	We used a variety of digital technologies when completing our Thriller Film. To begin, we used blogger as part of our digital technologies in order to keep track and update our teacher on where exactly we are at points throughout our project. On “blogger” we uploaded some 2 minute clips explaining any issues regarding our progress in our filming and accompanied our posts with images. Particularly on our areas of filming and permissions to use the areas – we used photos as photographic visual evidence to reinforce our posts. We used “Google “often as a research method to find some inspiration for our film. With Google we were able to create posts on ‘blogger’ using direct links to our inspiration. We also used “Youtube” a lot when we added links to clips e.g “The Black swan”, for another inspirational evidence for our thriller film. Also, when gathering permission for our thriller location, we used Gmail as a digital method to contact the area manager for our college in order to request the permission to use the car park. The digital technologies we used for actual filming was simply a camcorder. After we filmed we used Final Cut Pro to edit our film. We never had any need to use a sound recorder or garage band to edit sound in as most of the sound was collected while cam cording and all we had to do was edit the sound on the clip to make it louder.
Creativity: In what ways did you try to be original? How successfully did you balance the use of standard conventions of thrillers with the aim to be different or original? Eg consider  techniques used, narrative, character, mood, sound, themes, titles etc Research and Planning: How thorough and effective was your research into real media texts? How actively did you use your findings to create your own ideas? How well did you record your findings? How individual was your research? What was your role in planning and what was effective or not so effective?	We tried to be completely different when filming for our thriller. Most people followed on the task with a chase scene or a murder but we decided to use the ideas of a “Alter-ego” inspired by The Black Swan.  The inspiration of the black swan was an idea we synched in through real-life media conventions. Changing our characters hair colour and make-up was evidence to our audience that there was a psychological divide and change in character/personality. There was no real original material used in our film. The overall aim of our thriller was to be unique and try to differ from everyone else’s work. Our research was very beneficial when looking into inspiration and ideas for our media thriller. We looked into 2 minutes of a variety of thrillers and gained notes to post on our blog so we can reflect on any points which we may have wanted to use for our thriller. Particularly when we researched into the black swan, the ideas which were used in the film provided a good piece of inspiration and research to use for our thriller. We took the ideas of it to complete our own thriller.
Post production: This refers to the entire editing process (sound and vision). What specific skills have you individually developed in this area? What do you need to work on? How successfully did you work on sound and vision together?	While editing I developed a number of skills which I lacked on when completing the preliminary task. When we edited shots in the prelim we made the mistake of cutting them too shot, making the film confusing. This is a lack of continuity skills. Our sound bridge was broken due to cut shots. In order to change this we worked on how long we filmed shots for in order to edit them in the thriller film. Alongside this I gained skills in regarding special effects and the adding of them to the thriller film. Things such as a fade in – fade out and the effects of echoing and trails were added to our film which gave it more of an eerie, thriller feeling. In the future I plan to work on editing extra sound effects using garage band. We never seemed to have needed sound or voice overs as most of the sound was already within the film, but I believe with extra effects could benefit our film and the grade we achieve.
Using conventions from real media texts: Which specific conventions of the thriller genre did you choose to use in your product? How successfully did you use them? What were the reasons for not being able to use them?	As mentioned in digital technologies, we had a key inspiration to our work. This was that of ‘the black swan’. The thriller genre ideas in this film influenced our choice of thriller. The ideas of an alter-ego became a good inspiration for us and we copied the idea of our protagonist having an evil side.