Self Analysis - Naomi

Naomi- evaluating my skills and development

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)

Throughout the 2 years I believe that I have improved my media skills rapidly. I think one of my main strengths has been using blogger by displaying each post I write about in a blog type of way, I would add pictures, videos and highlight key points to try to make the blog looking as interesting as possible, and this also makes it easier and more enjoyable for people to read; we also made a video of me Ella and Folly discussing ideas for what to do next, I believe this is a really interesting and fun way to make the blog looking like a proper blog and I personally would find it easier to watch the video rather than read posts of writing. Something that I feel that I struggle with and isn’t my strengths is using different camera techniques to make the final video look impressive, Ella and Folly were the ones who helped decide what type of camera techniques we should use, as I would’ve chosen the basic camera shots (e.g ELS, LS, CU) throughout the whole sequence like we did for our foundation portfolio; but with their help we made lots of really creative camera techniques, to make our final video look really professional. When using final cut to edit our final video I found it very easy to edit our film and add different diegetic and non-diegetic sound. One problem I had with final cut pro was that the sound that we recorded didn’t record properly so therefore we had to use the sound from the camera that we used to film our final film, so the sound on our video wasn’t as clear as we would’ve wanted it to be.  

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

 

We wanted to make other thriller original but also we didn't want to make it a stereotypical scary thriller film which most people did so instead to used props such as guns and knives to create that. We also had to think creativity for many things within our final film, originally we were going to film our café scene inside Starbucks, or Costa Coffee but unfortunately the managers didn't get back to us, so we had to create a lookalike café inside Ellas bedroom we did this by getting a table and putting a table cloth on top of it, in the editing process we added diegetic sound of people talking and plates and drinks sounds, we successfully managed to create a café.

                                                      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?

When we had to research different thriller openings back in January I feel as if I didn't go into enough depth and when I read it back it feels very rushed, but analysing the thriller openings really did help me with what ideas I would want to use in my thriller opening, looking at the videos really made me realise what ideas I did and didn't want to use.

We tried to be as creative as possible with adding posts to our blogs we thought it talking about our ideas in videos would be much more interesting than just writing them on the blog, it makes it 100 times more interesting for the audience to really engage into what we are talking about.

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?

We did have a problem with our sound while editing we had used external sound recording but didn't listen back to it on the recorder to hear if it was clear enough, once we were about to use the sound from it we had a phone interruption sound in the background, which meant to couldn't use any of the sound recordings at all. We then had to re-record it all the sound again getting our actors back in to so that we could record them talking.

 

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?

In our thriller we tried to follow the conventions of a thriller very closely by adding props such as the knife and also the gun shot sound which you hear at the end of the film, these were used really well and creatively because it really added the thriller genre. We also used different camera work such as quick cuts and different angles to achieve that, we also adding music which would create a thriller based opening, making it feel intense.