Skill area
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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)
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Your teachers’ evaluation
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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)
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We used YouTube to decide what piece of un-copyrighted
non-diegetic sound we could play alongside the image as the protagonist was
chasing the antagonist through the woods. We picked a thrilling composition
with several beats, which could be used to represent the rising pace of the
character’s heartbeats as they are sprinting. We combined this as part of our
editing technique.
We used a variety of shot sizes during the first scene
when we filmed the protagonist staring at the cork board, which included a
medium-long shot, pan, close up and medium shot of the protagonist. During
the chase scene of the protagonist and antagonist through the woods we used
the handheld camera to show both character’s points of view, a stationary
camera which showed the characters at a long shot, which eventually became a
medium-close up as they ran past the camera at the top of the staircase. We
also used long shots at the end of the chase scene in order to give the
audience a clear interpretation of what was happening as the protagonist
caught up with the antagonist. We could have included more angled shots to
give a sense of diversity when using the camera, as well as, including more
shots to break down the length of some of our recorded material.
During our editing we made the ending action shot of the
protagonist punching the antagonist slow motion to give the audience of break
from the fast paced shots that we used. The non-diegetic sound also lost it’s
pace during this time.
When using Blogger we all contributed equally to our
group work used on our blog but when working individually it was clear that
some put in a lot more effort with their work than others. I feel that I
could have put in more effort with my work especially and focused more on
meeting the deadlines set.
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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
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?
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We focused on different ideas from thriller films, which
eventually lead us to have a protagonist and an antagonist, which is
extremely common amongst thriller films. Another common aspect of thriller
films is that they often have some kind of chase scene within them, hence,
why we included this in our film. To make our film original, we used
characters of different ethnicities to try and convey meaning to the audience
that someone’s race does not define them as either being all good, or all
bad, therefore, we decided that both our characters should be of a similar
colour of skin.
We did not use any diegetic dialogue in our film, which
is uncommon to find amongst thriller films, but as the characters didn’t
actually meet until the end of our film we didn’t feel that dialogue would be
necessary.
I feel that although we did not copy any thriller films
exactly, we could have put more of our own spin on our film to make it more
original than it was as we only really pieced together ideas from existing
thriller films.
We used the internet to watch different thriller
openings and a piece of our coursework on blogger helped us out a lot with
this. We researched the different locations where we might be able to shoot
our thriller opening, different props we could use, how to do bruise make-up
to develop the look of the victim’s in the photos and so they could all be
given a common injury in relation to the title of our film ‘Knock Out’. We
did all of our research together so that we could each get each other’s
opinions. We recorded all of our research on Blogger so that it would be
available for each member of our group to view later on.
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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?
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I did most of the editing of our thriller opening, as
well as, our preliminary task. I also edited together our risk assessment
video, so I have had a lot of experience with Final Cut Pro during my time on
the Media Studies course. My skills using Final Cut Pro have developed quite
significantly from when I first used the software to now.
I was able to piece together the thriller opening and
preliminary task according to the animatic we had created for both pieces of
work.
I feel that I need to work on giving our thriller
opening a better sense of pacing which I could do by filming more material
and pasting these shots into the timeline on Final Cut Pro at short durations
to make the film seem more action packed.
When choosing the non-diegetic sound, Antonio worked on
finding a suitable song that would fit the theme of our thriller opening.
Katie and Antonio then continued to edit the song to make it seem like it fit
perfectly with our film. By this, I mean that they were able to cut chunks
out of the song to make it run alongside the slower paced shots and the
faster paced shots.
There are some issues with this I have found as
sometimes it is easy to tell that the song has been tampered with as there
are sudden jumps that are noticeable, which could take the audience’s
attention away from the action on screen and to them wondering what’s
happening to the audio. I feel that if we had time to create our own
soundtrack for our film, the sudden jumps during the audio could have been
eliminated and would then run smoothly alongside the image.
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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?
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Conventions that we used in our preliminary task are
that of a stalker, following an innocent victim throughout her day. We showed
the audience the victim walking into college and having various close-ups of
the antagonist to give a sense of enigma. We also used over the shoulder
shots to show the antagonist following the victim, which also gave a sense of
mystery and fright.
In our thriller opening we used the chase scene with
inspiration from a variety of thriller films, like Taken, as they occur often
within this genre. We did this quite successfully as it was clear to the
audience who the protagonist and antagonist were, but if we had extra time in
which to fit more material into our film we could have included a back story
to the antagonist to give the audience knowledge of who he was and what he
had done for the protagonist to begin pursuing him. The audience are able to
determine themselves that the antagonist killed the victims on the corkboard.
If we had researched some more thriller films we could
have chosen more aspects common in a thriller film to expand our storyline;
however, we only had 2 minutes in which our film could last so we were unable
to fit together a large mixture of different material.
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Thursday, 11 September 2014
What skills have I developed this year? What are my strengths and weaknesses? What should I work on improving next year?
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