Exam question

Describe how you developed your post production skills for media production and evaluate how these skills informed your creative media practice. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills were developed over time.

Throughout the two years of the course I have developed my post production skills and these skills informed my creative media practice.

The two briefs I was given were at AS to create a 2 minute opening horror film sequence including titles, and at A2 I was to create a music promo package which included a music video, digipak and advert for the song ‘Shadows’ by Warpaint.

I will answer this question by first discussing post production at AS and then go on to discussing how I had developed at A2.

During the post production stages at AS I used IMovie, which was easy to use and enabled me to add various effects to the sequence. However I don’t think that this enabled me to be creative as much due to the small choice of effects that are provided, however the ones that I did use were effective and easy to use. At AS I also used photoshop to create my logo, which enabled me to be very precise and specific when I edited it, however photoshop wasn’t something that I was familiar with so it took me a while to get to grip with the tools that were available for me to use.  Photoshop allowed me to be creative because it allowed me to do anything I wanted to my logo and although I struggled with this at first I eventually got my desired logo. Using photoshop I was also able to use a large variety of different effects for my logo which allowed me to be creative as I could use many layers and fonts, which made me logo look unique. During post production at AS I also used blogger which is web 2.0, this allowed me to post things and get comments back from other users. This developed my post production skills for media as I began using blogger as I had never used it previously, and it allowed me to get feedback and comments from other uses on the work which I was doing. I also used an EMac, which I thought was very slow to use and not up-to-date. The EMac enabled me to be creative as there were many tools on there which I could use, and this developed my skills as it was something which I had never used before.

During the post production stage at A2 I moved on to using final cut rather than IMovie, and I found that final cut had a larger variety of effects which I could use and which were very effective for my music video. This enabled me to be more creative than I was at AS and it meant that I could now use both IMovie and final cut. Final cut also enabled me to use non linear editing and edit my music video in whichever order I liked, which meant that if there was a scene in the middle which I didn’t like then I could change it to something more preferable or use a better clip. This informed my creativity as It enabled me to experiment and try out clips which I hadn’t thought of using before, which turned out to be better than the ones that I had planned on using. Also, final cut enabled me to use the green screen, something which I was unable to do at AS on IMovie, and once I learned how to use it I realised that I could now do a wider range of things when editing my clips, which again allowed me to be more creative as I could choose more creative backgrounds than I would have previously been able to.  During A2 I also used web 2.0 technology again and put my music video on facebook, this allowed me to gain feedback from many people and it was something which I had never tried before. Some of the people which commented gave me ideas on how to improve, which I then took into account which gave me better ideas which therefor allowed me to have more creative ideas that I had previously never thought of, this was something which I didn’t do at AS which I feel would have helped me. I again used photoshop at A2 but this time I was more experienced due to the experience I had with it at AS, this time I was able to create more things on it such as a digipak and advert, and I was able to use images instead of just words. When using it the second time around I used a large amount of layerd compared to just using 2 at AS and this was something which made it look more effective.