Task 1 Progression from AS to A2

From our experience of producing the tasks from last year involving posting on Blogger, editing on Final Cut and filming with the camera allowed me to pick up some skills and techniques we had used and apply them for this A2 preliminary task and perhaps to our final A2 project. As well as learning and understanding some technique terms to help explain the reasons for why performed and did specific tasks. This therefore helped us to overcome some of these issues we faced in this present task allowing us to make situations easier and faster for us to complete.

I have learned that this course involves a lot of skills and knowledge to put into place as you have to be creative and come up with new and original ideas to help myself stand out from other media products in general. We have to the consider the research and planning towards the project we are creating as we would need to structure elements of it. For example the story line of our AS thriller film task was thought out by looking at different films that were relatable to this genre, we focused on what type of features played on our audience’s fears to make our opening film more effective. When it came to planning the final piece we designed a storyboard which we used to see the type of shots and images we would take when it came to filming as well as being descriptive of the events occurring in each scene, this was extremely helpful as we could refer back to it and know what we were doing on the day which allowed us to save time. I put this theory to our preliminary and will indeed to the same in the future as this was very effective and useful for creating the most realistic and believable product .

I have also had a lot of involvement in technology overall including software and physical equipment. We used a video editing kit on Apple’s Mac Final cut express which allowed us to organize and put effects towards making both our final media products. Also using Adobe’s Photoshop helped us create our Digipack overall including the size, shape and content within it. We managed to understand the techniques more by experimenting and playing about with the tools that were available to us as well as reading and watching tutorials about the methods on how to produce and do specific features through the internet using sites such as Youtube a video sharing site where many users post videos on their channel for anybody to watch.  We also used devices such as the media department’s video cameras allowing us to record and hold a range of different videos clips necessary for making our product. I will take these knowledge and skills and apply them to our future tasks as we already know how to perform these features and methods allowing us to gain an advantage as we could then save time learning this again, we can therefore put this time into research and planning towards our future project for example.

It is also important to show evidence of my findings and experiment with different techniques for our media projects and products. By showing evidence I can support and refer to my theory of research and planning. With experimenting and creating many versions of the same work we can compare each one to see what design for example is the most suitable for our own product, both of these will help to create the best piece of work something I will indeed make sure I do when performing A2.

Personally speaking I believe that this is one of my strongest points as I have also outside of media had experience into this when taking my GCSE’s in graphics and art which involves a range of creative techniques as I have explained above, I could therefore then and now help my groups members suggest ideas and solutions to potential problems we had for example we had difficulty creating a logo and symbol for our genre of thrash metal  I then came up with the idea of drawing and scanning in an A4 piece of paper to upload to Photoshop where we could edit and apply it to our Digipack. I hope that I able to take advantage of this to help my group members and myself out when making our A2 project.

However the side that lets me down is perhaps consulting with my group members as I didn’t know them as well despite this when the time went on I managed to build a relationship with them when working on the task overall allowing my performance levels to improve and a confidence boost leading onto producing a better product. I have been fortunate that one of my group members in the AS project is still in my group however I will be getting a new member which means building a relationship again. 

In conclusion I have found my AS experience to be extremely helpful, I have diffidently learned to give and show evidence to my work, research and planning as well as using the physical resources to my gain and apply them to the making of our music video project in the future for A2.