Alex - Evaluating my skills development

"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)"

 

My strength in Media is definitely blog work and keeping to a consistent theme. I originally kept a blog using Blogger in 2011 which ultimately didn’t take off at all. Since coming to college and learning about: formatting, use of mulit-media, and working in a group – I have since progressed in my skills. For example, we have used the same theme on our foundation and advanced portfolios - but the overall look has greatly improved. Looking mainly at the positioning of gadgets, and making sure our archive is not positioned at the top of the blog. Our foundation portfolio also wasted a lot of space - there was a lot of empty space on the sides, whereas we have now optimized all the space we could use.

My weakness would be Final Cut Pro - I have understood the basic tools and can piece film together at a slow pace, but the rest needs constant re-teaching. This year I really would like to excel in After Effects, and not have to be constantly reminded in Final Cut. To do this, I could: look up tutorials on YouTube, ask Matt or Sophie (the technicians) for advice, and experiment in my own time (prior to the creation of our film).

I also used Photoshop to create our group's logo - this is a skill I have been mastering over the past 4 years, outside of my education. Photoshop has been helpful in my other college subjects, so feel that this will benefit us 
in the long run.

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"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."

Our creativity was mainly in our setting and usage of outside knowledge. We had access to a police station in East Croydon - a very uncommon setting which we used to our advantage. We can thank our group's Holly Cheesmur for arranging this through her dad's work. 

Our standard conventions of dramatic lighting, desaturation and restricted narrative was questionable. Lighting has always been something we need to improve on - again, to improve this, we could invest in our own lighting, look up tutorials or just experiment prior to filming. General aesthetics of our film was very pleasing; our colouring was consistent, our use of special FX weren't gory (which would make our Thriller film opening a Horror).

I feel that our narrative was also unique due to its complexity - we involved a murder, had various characters involved and made the narrative very dark.

There were definitely aspects of our narrative that didn't work - like trying to explain the remainder of the storyline when we're only meant to film the first 2 minutes. This is something I am excited to work on in our A2 film - having to tell a beginning, middle and end in 5 minutes.

Our titling, although left until the last minute, proved to be successful. Using eerie non-diegetic sounds from unused footage, we accompanied  it with a simple white font on a black background to create title that fit the conventions of a typical Thriller. We were consistent with our usage of fonts, and used Photoshop to create these box-type credits. I feel that this was unique as many of the other AS groups used default fonts on their film openings.

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"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?"

For our research, we had a set homework task to look at Thriller openings back in January where I personally looked at 'Usual Suspects', 'The Disappearance of Alice Creed', 'The Bourne Ultimatum',  and 'No Country For Old Men' - that blog post can be found here! 

Looking back at the research now, I can see that my analysis wasn't very in-depth, it's more like a discussion or narration on top of the film. However, I did feel that this research came in handy as I was completely uneducated on the conventions of a Thriller. From this research task, I had made some notes depicting the running themes, those being: dried blood, sterile sinks, desaturated colour, minimal dialogue, dehumanising characters/superhuman, POV shots, and death. 

We also had Meg and Holly looking up similar Thriller openings, such as 'Cabin In The Woods', 'Pulp Fiction' & 'The Woman In Black'. Other than these 7 film openings, we hadn't actually analysed any other films - this will be something to consider with our short films. Any chance we can get to even watch a short film, we probably should. This will help us develop our ideas, get an idea for our timings and stick to our genre conventions.

 A lot of our planning was round Meg's special FX as a lot of it was experimental. It began with Meg's usage of bruising in this blog post.  She had used images, listed the products used and how it would be used. Then our teacher taught us about using toilet paper, glue and paints to create bloody wounds. Using my hand as a model, our group all had a go at making me look as gross as we could.

My job during the research & planning was originally to find appropriate settings. The original plot was set in the backs of Crawley's County Mall - as two of our group members work in the building, we assumed that access should be easy. We never actually heard back from management/security, and ultimately felt that Croydon police station was much better.

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"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?"

Sound has always been a problem for us; in our Thriller opening and preliminary short. Our Thriller was the first time we had used external sound recording successfully - although it took us a while  to figure out, we it all worked out in the end through strenuous editing. From the example here (from our Preliminary), you can see that the audio doesn't quite match up; this is because we had lost the original sound file, and had to compromise with audio from a clip we had not used. The aim for this year it to just work quicker and be more efficient.

A skill that was pointed out to use early on in the Thriller production was our organisation - we had labelled each of our clips, organised them into appropriate folders and kept all of our products together on one drive/computer.  This made our pre-production very easy as we didn't have to worry about transferring data every session.

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"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?"

In our Thriller, we followed the conventions of a Thriller very closely. We looked at using quick cuts appropriately when showing flashback scenes, and demonstrating these flashbacks scenes through off-screen narration and black + white editing. We accompanied this with tense music, which proved to actually be quite hard - so we created a blog post on it. Thrillers also rely on the audience reaction, so we created a storyline which isn't unrealistic - putting the audience in an all-to-real situation such as murder can make them feel scared. In editing, directors like to use jump cuts; which we actually did demonstrate in our flashbacks while the main character is walking!

Our characters were appropriate to the genre; fairly average characters with the main villain being slightly 'disconnected' from society. The antagonist was pale, and had dark circles under his eyes to demonstrate this disconnection .

As I have already said, our lack of low key lighting is something we would work on if we were to make another Thriller. Due the nature of our setting (in a police station), it was difficult to tamper with lighting for security reasons so had to settle with the lighting in the room, and 2 external LED lights. We were near enough flood-lighting the actors, and it was unnecessary for the genre.