AS level coursework review

Practical tasks-
The practical tasks I completed in my AS level media project were my preliminary task, a comedy thriller named 'The kandy killer', and my final piece, a british gangster thriller opening named 'Run'. My group chose the comedy thriller theme for our preliminary task as we wanted the film to be light hearted and to make people laugh, with the chocolate bar themed puns scattered throughout. For our final piece however, we ditched the comedy aspect, choosing to have the opening portray darker themes and perhaps be more hard hitting to viewers. we made this change as we thought that a comedy theme would not feel as serious to the viewer and we wanted to make our final piece have some sort of an impact when watched. The use of black and white colours enhanced the gritty, violent aspect to the piece and also reflected how older gangster films were filmed. 
The comedy genre interested me as it was fun to be able to make people laugh through our piece and I think it is quite a task to be able to make a product that actually succeeds in making people smile. The gangster-thriller theme, on the other hand, was interesting to me as it allows you to play with suspense and scare the viewers.

Influences-
A media product that influenced my final piece heavily is Quentin Tarantino's 'Reservoir dogs', this films themes show through in our film opening as it has very violent themes based around the stories of a group of gangsters, Tarantino's dark style also shows through in our final piece. Our preliminary task did not have any influences, however, being a completely original piece. I think the wide array of gangster movies that influenced our final piece all showed through in the moody, dark and gritty style that we used.

Technology-
We used a vast array of technologies in the process of creating the final task, from hardware such as cameras and microphones to allow us to record the raw footage and Adobe premier pro to edit the footage and put it together in sequence to create the opening. The hardware I used the most was the camera, as I had troubles with the microphones not working so had to use the camera alone to record certain parts of the sounds, leading to it being of bad quality. The software I used the most was the program 'Adobe premier pro' a video editing program. Premier pro was very good to use as it was simple to pick up and had a very shallow learning curve, meaning that it was not hard to get straight into editing our piece quickly and effectively.

Editing-
I did learn a few things about editing during the first year of my media course, however since I was in charge of foley I have a disadvantage against the rest of the class (I'll catch up). I did, however, learn how to do audio matches to action in shot, such as footsteps, which will be very useful if I choose to create a music video, as I may have to lipsync video to audio. Some other editing skills I learned whilst creating my final and prelim pieces include how to download material from online and convert it to the correct platforms, how to export the pieces once finished, trimming and editing shots and soundclips and how to do other premier pro based tasks, such as reordering clips.

Sound and lighting-
I learned a lot about sound throughout the course, the first thing being, how to create music on Garageband for the I-pads. I created a range of songs as music for the opening, however I found it hard to create a song that suited the mood of our piece, and thought that anything that wasn't right would jeopardise the quality of our entire piece so decided against using them. The next thing I learned to do in relation to sound was to record sound through the camera, however during this process the microphone I was using stopped working so I had to resort to using the microphone built into the camera, which meant that the sound quality was not as good as id hoped. I also learned to use Premier pro to add these recorded sounds (and others i had downloaded) to our piece, this included changing the levels of the clips and cutting them to the right lengths. For lighting we took part in a lighting workshop, in which I learned the differences between different types of light (low key, high key) and haw and when to use them, I also learned how harsh light and soft light can contrast each other, amongst other things, such as candlelight. We implemented this knowledge in our final piece by using low key lighting to cement the mood we were trying to achieve.

Blog-
In my AS project I did not document my work as it progressed to the extent that I could have on my blog, this is not saying that I slacked entirely on the blog work, just that I could perhaps have created more posts, detailing what we did in each lesson and how it progressed my skills and helped me work towards my final finished product. I could have used screenshots more effectively to show the behind the scenes of how my final piece progressed. Saying all of this, however, I am still proud of how my blog came out, however think that it was a little lacking in areas.

Whats next?-
For my A level project I would like to create a music video, working in a team, perhaps with Alex Flinders, I reckon we would be a good team as I know that he has good ideas and is very proficient with everything media studies based. I am looking forward to learning more about editing and how to use premier pro to edit the video together, not only the sound, as this may be my job in the team, I will elaborate further into the types of music video that inspire me in a later post.