What skills have I developed this year? What are my strengths and weaknesses? What should I work on improving next year?

Skill area	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)	Your teachers’ evaluation
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)	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.
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?	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.
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?	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.
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?	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.