Evaluation-Harry Quilley

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)	·         Blogger use needs a lot of more work, a took advantage of the fact that now actually work was due and tended to do little work within the blog, this made things a lot harder when doing the evaluation on my opening and just increase the workload when working under pressure for the deadline. ·         Searching the internet for ideas and examples to show on the blog ·         The use of sound Foleys and added noises were at a minimum, recording our own Foleys and sounds to edit with will allow us to personalise a recording and get the right length and sound we need rather than relying on something else. ·         When trying to find people to review our film when completed, ask them specific question on what they thought not just the film in general. ·         Our title sequence editing was very lacklustre and rushed, colours where mixed and it had very little attention to detail which started the opening of a little negatively.
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.	·         Trying to be original is something I like to do a lot, but in some cases my ideas are way too much and cannot be filmed in the time frame we have. We had a good mix if conventional thriller film work added with the new, different styles and shots that we created. ·         Each character was a the same stereotypical male antagonist, we felt this was best because of the filming we required and the shots we wanted needed a lot of time and using outside people to help with actor may have not gone as well as it did. Mainly in the swimming pool scene which took a long time to shoot and wasn’t easy to get right. ·         Titling, time wasn’t on our side. We had a good plan in place for a graphic match that we still managed to pull off in the first scene but unfortunately we didn’t have the time
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?	·         Over the time we had to plan our thriller opening, a lot of time went into the settings of our piece, exploring different locations and how we could use it as well as we could, however on a few occasions mainly the first Gatwick trip, we didn’t follow our plan and got very little footage for our film, prompting us to return at a later date with a new plan and follow it to get the right scenes and location appropriate to the rest of our opening. ·         We also did a lot of research into other movies to help expand our ideas into something more realistic as well as giving us the idea for a pool scene; this gave us more help filming the pool scene with things like camera angles, lighting and continuity with match on actions. ·         When we first chose then Gatwick location, I was in charge of finding what we could and can’t film, and where we could film it from. As it is a very secure area and we must plan ahead before we visit. We spent very little time filming and more time debating which left little time to do any of the dramatic shots within the plane or the hanger as we had used our time it was no longer accessible.
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?	·         As a whole, our post production went fairly well, but got a little rushed near the end as we had to meet the deadline. ·         Our first rough put together of scenes clearly showed us that we needed a lot of work to make it clean and clear with no colour changes from scene to scene. Although 1 or 2 scenes did fail because of the white balance, we used this to our ability to make a fade to black shot right at the end which increases the ENIGMA. ·         I feel as though personally a have a good skill set within post production sounds, whether it is getting just the right Foley to fit the scene or a voice-over to enhance a meaning for what is happening.
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?	·         Enigma (miss you john) was something we aimed for from the start, it was something we had seen in a few other thrillers when researching and thought it would be something good to aim for within our film. ·           ·         When we came to creating the enigma, with such a short space of time, you don’t have much time but you still have to give the audience enough information to figure a storyline but not giving too much away from the actually film. The way we had 2 different people being focused on each time will create an Enigma; this leaves the audience with a decision to make. Another convention we wished to use was a shadowed darkness, however as time and space at the 2 main locations the pool and the hangar had very limited time frames to plan and film our shots it made it hard to film at a night-time at Gatwick as there is nobody from airport to overlook the filming and insure safety and security.