Skills Development

For AS media i produced an opening of a film of the horror genre. This meant carrying out a number of tasks to insure i created the best possible result.

Pre-production and planning was a very important part of my production. I feel i could have improved in many ways but also carried out some tasks very well. For example I feel that i researched into films very well and got an idea of what rules to follow when thinking about my own opening to a film. This enabled me to get ideas of the correct techniques to be carried out and also how to apply these. However i do believe that i could have looked into the films in more detail and not just analysing them. I carried out a questionnaire to collect some information about my target audience to ensure that my final project appeals to the correct target audience. However I also think that i could have asked more questions in more detail to get a better overview of what appeals to the audience of this age. I believe that I could have looked into institutions a lot more to get an idea of what type of company would be relevant to out genre and film, this would have improved my evaluation as it would have made it much more relevant and I would have had a much better understanding. After some of the basic research i wrote a film proposal of the basic outline of out idea, I think i could have done this in much more detail as it left us with room to change the project which may sound like it gives room for improvement but it also leaves much more room for error which it is very important to avoid. So i believe if i had written this up in more detail it may have reduced the risk of error later on in the year. I think our storyboarding could have been drastically improved as it didn't really give us any idea of how the production was going to look and when it came to filming it meant we then found out that some of the shots didn't work and this meant changing some of them which then complicated the rest of the shots and getting them to work well. I am pleased with our location pictures as it gave us the ability to plan around the surroundings and work out how to set the scene we want which made filming a much simpler process. Due to our storyboard not being as good as it could have been we carried out a test film which enabled us to get an idea of what shots work well and what didn't so when it came to out final production we would finish with a much better result. I believe this was a very important part of our planning and definitely improved our final production.

During our production we carried out a lot of work to ensure that we had the best possible results however there is definitely room for improvement. During the filming I believe that i improved on seeing what shots will work well and what ones simply wont. It also enabled me to develop my skills on making sure that we follow both the 180 and 45 degree rule. However I do believe that I need to improve on planning slightly in advance to editing to understand when the shots should finish so that the shots don't drag on too far and not follow on smoothly. I also think that the planning for mis-en-scene went well as we insured that we followed the conventions and made sure that our actors fitted in well with the atmosphere we were trying to create. Overall i think that out production was the most successful part of our whole project.

Post production was a very important part of our project as it involved hours of editing. It took us a very long time to achieve out final clip and also needed us to do a little extra filming. I believe that our editing went very well on ensuring that our clips follow on well. However i do think that finding the correct music was a struggle all the way through. It meant we had cut clips down and increase the speed when necessary to ensure that the music fitted well, however this took a very long time and may not have been as it could have been if we had created music to fit our opening perfectly. Come the end of the editing process there became a issue that it may not finish as well as it could so we might need to add in an extra scene which will act as the opening following on to clarify that its not a trailer. However there was a lot of debate on whether this scene made the clip any better or if it simply killed the atmosphere created.