Laura Brownlie - Evaluating skills and development

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)	Camera: By the end of the filming proses I was getting a lot better at using the camera making sure we used the tri-pod for all still stots, for our tracking shots the camera could be improved as they weren’t very smooth.  When I’m using the camera I’m still not know how to do some effects which could have been effective in our thriller opening, e.g. Focus Pull.  Using a focus pull could have given our thriller a sense of mystery, but as I didn’t know how to do it we left it out. Blogger: When we first started the course I had never used a blog site before so wasn’t sure how to use it.  Over the last year I’ve have got used to how the site works   When writing a post I’m very good at inserting videos and pictures but I often forget to add this like hyperlinks. Final Cut Pro: there is a lot more I could improve on in final cut pro, I only used basic editing techniques for our thriller like Cut and fades. I could learn a lot more about titling learning. We had very basic titles with the only the word appearing on the screen and no effects; we also didn’t use any other effects in our whole film. Garageband: I didn’t use too many effects on garageband instead I used folyes or sound form the clips, to improve we could of added sound from garageband.	Maybe a little more on what you used the internet for in terms of research any specific films?  Consider the stills and hyperlinks you used on your blog in planning and research.  You were very skilled at FC go into some more detail mention past experience and what you gained in terms of new skills
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	We originally found it difficult to come up with ideas for our thriller opening.  We ended up with a Storyline that was very stereotypical to the thriller genera. Originally we came up with a list of location we could use to film in and used that to come up with a narrative for our thriller, If we had come up with a narrative first and then found locations to fit with our openings we could have been a lot more creative instead of creating a story to fit with our locations. Most of our characters were stereotypical for a thriller film. In future we could have mixed up the roles of the characters to give it a twisted feeling; we did start to do this with having the ‘villain’ as a woman instead of a man. The sounds in opening where also very typical to the thriller genera giving it a creepy eerie effect feeling, I could have used a different style of music/sounds but as it was my first time using the sound editing software I want to make sure it worked.	I disagree that you had typical characters the female protagonist and the older male you could make a lot more of these.  Agreed on the locations there could have been more connection between them
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?	To Research the opening to our thriller film I watched a lot of openings to other thriller films, this gave me an idea on techniques I could use. To Improve on this I could watch the whole film instead of just the opening, This would give me an idea of how the opening has an effect on the rest of the film.  Not much research was done looking in to props used, we just used the props available at the filming location, If more research was done the props would fit into the setting more. Unlike the props I spent a lot more time looking in to the style of costumes for our characters, looking at stereotypical costumes for thriller and costumes that went with the style of our opening. Once we stared filming we don’t uses the costumes that I had looked up we used costumes that we had that were similar in future it would Improve our film if we had the costumes that we wanted.	Again be specific about the films you used for inspiration also remember the Art of the title for the title sequences.  What is a typical costume?  I think you mean that it is set in the present day meaning contemporary dress was appropriate in other words this was not a period drama
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?	The editing techniques that I used so far have been very basic, using cut for most of the transitions and hardly using any effects.  I did start to try and use some dissolves and other transitions once I had got more confident with the editing software which worked well. To improve with the future I should try and learn how to do more things on final cut pro before I start which will give me more confidence when working on future projects Our sound was very basic with no dialogue at all. Most of our sound effects were foleys, with only a few used from garageband. Apart from the sound all of the sounds were diegetic. The titles we used were very basic, with the only the word appearing on the screen and no effects, this was because I didn’t know how to do anything else with then.	What do you mean by basic sound?  Try and use correct media language terms what were the reasons for a simple soundscape was it to create an enigma?  Raising questions in the opening is what happens in a thriller
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?	One of the specific conventions of a thriller that I wanted to use was to create an enigma, we did this by not adding any dialogue, the audience not seeing the face of one of the characters and by using parallel editing between the different characters so you don’t know how they’re connected.  This worked well although it sometimes seemed that there wasn’t a storyline as it just looked like there were three random characters doing completely unrelated things. To solve that problem we could have had one character call another to show they were connected.	More on the older male and the female protagonist needed.  Consider the MES rather than three random characters you could discuss how they are linked later in the film try again to use more media language