Robert Johnstone's AS Level Media Studies Blog

Now that all of my coursework for AS Level Media Studies is now complete, I have now completed the first half of my Media Studies subject which is worth 50% of my overall grade in AS Media Studies.

Since the beginning of September I have progressed significantly in my knowledge and understanding of digital media and the practical makings of films. Our Main Task has come out very successful with our target audience loving our 2 minute Opening Sequence. Alex and I have worked well as a team and we both managed to deliver excellent ideas for this film which we both teamed up for. We both enjoyed working together and we hope to continue this work ethic next year onto A2.

His skills in sound production have improved since September, however my skills in editing and special effects using editing software have noticeably changed over the last 8 months. I was a complete beginner to editing and Media Production in September and I had no real background in editing videos at all. At the beginning of the course I was also very unsure if I was taking the right course for AS, however I soon began to quickly to change my mind and progress my skills in Media Studies and editing as I became very fond of the subject once I had got the ball rolling. I have transferred my editing skills from Premiere Pro into Sony Vegas which is now an editing software I feel comfortable with. I have even started to use this software to make my very own YouTube videos on my channel as I grown an interest in editing. My skills in editing my Preliminary Task and Main Task have also transferred to allow me to use other editing programs such as Audacity, Photoshop, Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity and many more.

Overall Alex and I are both very happy with our individual progressions in Media Studies and media production which have allowed us to not only develop our skills for this subject but also transfer these into other hobbies or things we do in our spare time. I am very much looking forward to embarking on the A2 course for next year!

Looking back through your Preliminary Task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Over the past several months of the media course, my skills in Media Studies have grown and progressed significantly. When I created my first ever task in AS-Level Media Studies (the 60 second remake copy), I produced this with very little knowledge of the software and hardware I was using. I also had very little knowledge on the camera angles and camera settings we had used as mentioned in Question 6 about my learning of technologies. From this task, I progressed onto the Preliminary Task of a 2 minute maximum short video of myself and Alex improving our skills from what we learnt from the re-make film and using more equipment whilst introducing better camera angles and editing techniques. We managed to add in the 180 degree rule, the shot reverse shot and a wide shot of the scene into our Preliminary Task which were essentially the only camera angles in the entire task. However, this changes in our Main Task as we added many more shots including close ups, mid shots, long shots and even handheld shots of me filming the characters fighting so the footage looked more realistic and effective to the audience.

Video Thumbnail for our Main Task "Anonymous"

I learnt in particular the importance of lighting and how effective it can be depending when shooting a scene with low key lighting. This progression is clearly shown when comparing my Preliminary Task to my Main Task as the lighting in the Preliminary is grainy, flat and gloomy which wasn't very appealing for broader audiences to watch. This was a major learning curve on how to avoid grainy footage and when to monitor the appropriate lighting for our film. Just like our Preliminary Task, our Main Task also consists of low key lighting, however having learnt from our mistakes in the Preliminary we soon realized that we could use stage lighting and photography lighting too which could improve our lighting for our sequence a lot more. In my Main Task, the lighting is much more focused on the characters and even creates silhouettes of the outlines of the characters for aesthetic effects. This is mainly because we spent much more time on the Main Task and we used much more professional equipment including the photography lights which aided us for our advanced quality lighting in the dark drama studio where we filmed most of our Main Task opening sequence. As i was in charge of editing the film together, I also felt comfortable enough to mess around with contrast and hue settings on Sony Vegas to not give our final product a flat image.

We had a very flat image in our Preliminary Task as we were inexperienced with photography lighting and camera settings.

In our Main Task, we now used photography lighting and were able to achieve much more contrasting silhouettes of the actors faces which builds depth into the shots. I also edited the original footage so that the film didn't have a flat image compared to the Preliminary.

When Alex and I were recording the footage and audio for our opening sequence of our Main Task "Anonymous", I found out that the best technique was to film as many shots as possible so when we got back into the computer suite to edit, we had several shots of the same scene to choose from so we weren’t limited on choice. This is something which we didn't do in our Preliminary Task as we simply didn't spent enough time filming as all we did record our footage in one capture for each scene meaning we had no other variety of choice. Alex and I also didn't know how to portray or represent our characters in our Preliminary task either . We had no idea how portraying character could aid a film so much as we just aimlessly put two characters in to it not knowing that they have no meaning. However this changed massively in our Main Task as we spent lots more time developing the storyline and researching our characters representations and portrayals which really made a difference to our overall product and made it easier for our characters to fit the type of film and storyline.
In the making of my Main Task, we were experiencing using Adobe Premiere Pro a lot more than when we were making the Preliminary task. This was because we were spending a lot more time on this bigger task and we were adding a lot more effects that enhanced the Opening Sequence including sound effects, titles and audio. We were the only pair in the class working together as everyone else was working in groups of three. This meant we were at a slight disadvantage of having one less person working in our group, however we didn’t struggle at all working in a pair and we finished feeling successful by reaching the deadlines on time.

Our Secondary Audience watching our Main Task

In the making of the sound, from the Preliminary task we were not adding any extra sound effects at all, we just added a backing track sort of sound. Whereas for our Main Task, Alex was experimenting with Garage-Band as he was in charge of the sound in our small group whilst he also researched sound effects for violent action scenes and composing background soundtracks. We included a range of diegetic sounds including the violent noises of the tables and doors slamming, the characters speeches and many non-diegetic sounds including the sound effects of the punching, the car horn and the background soundtrack. Theses were all sound effects which we had again never added in the making of our Preliminary Task as we were inexperienced as to how we would insert these sounds into our film. Alex had to make the audio we collected sounding very clear and import them in the right places in sync with the video I had imported onto Premiere Pro and eventually Sony Vegas. At first he found this difficult as it was hard to get the sound effects to be precisely in sync with the footage however he was soon able to fix this once we managed to sync the two sounds together.

Overall looking back at my Preliminary Task I have learnt and significantly improved my skills in editing film footage to create a short Opening Sequence which has been tweaked using camera settings, contrast settings, and lighting on set. I have also learnt the importance of working as a team and how effective teamwork is in producing a final product which has been praised for and enjoyed by many people. Finally the importance of research and organisation on set and preparation for filming that results in much more enjoyable Opening Sequence to watch compared to the Preliminary which was poorly planned and did not turn out as successful as our Main Task.

How did we attract/address our audience?

Alex and I were both receiving feedback on our main task through primary and secondary audiences. Our primary audience were people who wanted to see the film and told us what they liked and what they disliked about our film. We listened to people’s views on what they felt like needed to be improved and we acted upon it quickly by improving our film with those improvement ideas. For example, our audience mainly said our titles were too big which got in the way of the screen time, so we made the titles smaller to allow the audience to engage with sequence as well as briefly reading the various titles we had put in. This therefore shows that our attracted audience have engaged with our Opening Sequence and are always giving feedback to us to help improve our film for their entertainment and that they are excited to watch once finished.

For our secondary audience feedback, we attracted them to our Opening Sequence by posting our film through various social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and Twitter. This way we could increase our secondary audience viewing even more and will encourage them to watch our product. What was really helpful also was that they left plenty of comments in the description or comments section asking us various questions and giving us both excellent feedback for any additional final improvements. Our secondary audience would not have seen our rough drafts and initial ideas of our Opening Sequence before hand, so this was a completely blind test for them and for Alex and I too to see people's reaction to our product.

I tweeted out to my followers on Twitter about our Opening Sequence which took them to a direct link to it via YouTube.

Alex posted on Facebook the Opening Sequence which got the most of our audiences attention and gave us the most feedback!

This is the Opening Sequence published onto my YouTube Channel where we got some more audience attention.

Navigation

Finished Blog | Conclusion

Evaluation | Question 7

Evaluation | Question 6

Evaluation | Question 5

How did we attract/address our audience?

Evaluation | Questions 1-4

"ANONYMOUS" | AS LEVEL MEDIA STUDIES Main Task (Final Version)

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