REVIEW OF AS PROJECT.

For our AS media project, which you can find here, we did a 2 minute opening to a film.
It was a really fun project to do, but it was time consuming and complex to acheive the standard that we acheived. Our development from our preliminary task (which is here - click) to our final piece (which is here - click) is in my opinion incredible. At the beginning of this course, none of us really knew how to film, edit or plan a film and the outcome that we acheived was of a high standard, so we were all really proud of ourselves. Our preliminary task was really poor, we broke a few of the things we shouldn't have broken, for example the 180 degrees rule. Though the editing and filming was of a low standard, the concepts and ideas we had were good. We took what we had learned from this excersise into consideration when filming and editing our final film opening and the fact that we had experience, and more knoweledge of what was and was not decent made us strive to make it the best that we could have made it.

PRE PRODUCTION:
Pre production for me, was the easiest part of this project. It involved looking into products that already existed, for example, Paranormal Activity as it was a film in the genre that we were looking into using. We also had to look at target audiences and planned a questionnaire to see what people in that age range would prefer to see. We had to plan what we were going to do in detail, the shots, the storyline, camera angles, actors, directors, camera persons etc. In our media blog, a lot of our posts were about the pre production part of the project, we had the answers to our questionnaire, 2 or 3 film opening analysis', conventions of that specific genre and more.
PRODUCTION:
During the production process, we stumbled upon a few hurdles, that eventually we got around. This was mainly due to lackluster planning and not thinking in enough detail about what we were going to do. Thankfully, we had locations that were close to college and if we had something we weren't too pleased with, we could go and re-film right away. In total, we spent about 3 days filming in Magpie Bottom and in the Cabot Eye. Many things went wrong during the process, we found out that we couldn't use a copyrighted song - which meant we had to change the soundtrack in the background. We eventually made it in garageband and spent about 2 hours writing and recording a voiceover for the film opening. Miss Street also said that we should add a bit at the end of our opening, so we quickly scripted it and then went back to where the 'flashbacks' were filmed to make it convenient. During production, we used our minds creatively whilst filming. We tried out new ideas, concepts and ways of filming and some of it came out really well. We were always on top of our filming and blog posts, which made the production process easier for us. We stuck to the conventions of our genre, and our filming went well.
POST PRODUCTION:
Post production, was a difficult process for us. None of us really knew how to edit on the machines well and it worried us due to the high standard that we hoped to get. Along the way, we learnt how to edit on Adobe Premiere Pro a lot better, and at the end of the process we had achieved a good standard of editing considering where we had come from. We had a bit of trouble with our music production and post production as we couldn't use the song we had actually based it around, we had to make another soundtrack in Garageband and then edit it into the film, then editing the levels to how we had needed it. We also had to incorporate the voiceover into this. After all of this, our film opening came out at a really high grade and we are extremely proud of what we have achieved in that year. We kept on top of our blogs, which kept our grade high, and we continuously posted new blog posts about what was going well, and what could have been going better. We uploaded our videos - preliminary task, final project 1, final project 2 - to youtube so that we could 'distribute' them and get feedback from people that don't know us personally, as there will always be a bias opinion from someone you know as they don't want to hurt your feelings.

At the end of this year, I am proud of both my blog and my final piece. Myself and my group worked extremely hard, and I think that we all complimented each other in the fact that we're all good at different aspects of the process. This is why we've decided to work together again on our A2 media project.