For my Foundation Portfolio I created a two-minute film opening in the horror genre and for my Advanced Portfolio I made a short film in the social realist genre. Over the two years I learnt a host of new skills relating to digital technology which helped me create two different and very successful media products, along with synergous ancillary tasks – a film poster and a website.
At AS, in terms of pre-production, as I had never used a digital video camera or any video editing software before, I made a short sequence to learn basic shot types and editing conventions – shot/reverse shot, the 180 degree rule and match on action. This task also involved setting up a blog to record my media work. I chose Blogger as it has a user-friendly interface and allowed me to add ‘labels’ to organize my posts. I also set up a YouTube channel where I uploaded my finished sequence and embedded it into my blog so that my teacher and other students could review and comment on my work. I also uploaded pictures of my storyboard to my blog as evidence of my work. I researched the most suitable editing software to use for this task and for future products and came to the decision to use iMovie. I learned basic editing skills such as splitting clips, adjusting the length of clips and changing the volume. These initial steps all developed my creative use of digital technology in that I worked out practical ways to realize my vision for my film opening.
Digital technology was essential during the research and planning stages of my tasks. At AS, I learned about the conventions of film openings through watching numerous examples on YouTube of my horror genre. I completed a shot-by-shot analysis of a scene that inspired me from ‘Scream- the Netflix series’ for which I uploaded screen grabs of each shot to my blog to enable really close analysis. This also helped me to appreciate the types and framing of iconic shots, which are conventional for a horror. I was then able to be creative with my shots while maintaining the style of the genre, as I had a broader knowledge of which camera angles and shot styles would be successful. I also made digital collages using PowerPoint, Canva.com and SlideShare to create a specific ‘look’ for my film opening. In terms of communication, for my actor I set up a group chat on FaceBook with the rest of my group so that we could communicate easily. I also used the internet to research non-copyrighted music to use for my film opening, and spent many hours on freeplaymusic.com where I was able to search suitable genres. Also I had to record using a digital recording device the ‘jack in the box sound’ to avoid copywriting someone else’s music for my non-diegetic soundtrack.
During production digital technologies were of some use also, as using a digital voice microphone to record my voice-overs helped generate clearer speech for my actresses.
It was at post-production that digital technology was especially key to the success of my film opening. I used iMovie to edit rough cuts and got feedback from focus groups, who were able to spot one occasion where my editing was not quite continuous, showing my props movement in shits where they were the same. It was useful to be able to upload my rough cuts to YouTube for multiple audience feedback to help iron out any issues. I then used iMovie to cut and fade the track I’d recorded in and out, mixing it with a second track I had chose on freeplaymusic.com, so my film opening became more dramatic, using sound bridging to link my two inside and outside locations. It was useful to find out how to manipulate the volume of the soundtrack at key points, such as turning it down to hear the diegetic sound of the speech announcement.
In terms of post-production, I experimented with lots of different kinds of digital technology to make my evaluations of my AS task, including: PowerPoint uploaded to Slideshare and embedded in my blog; Prezi; iMovie clips uploaded to YouTube. Also using a software called ‘Motion’ I was able to create my own film Ident. This enabled me to tackle the evaluation stage in a creative way, using a variety of digital media.
At A2 I was much more comfortable with using a wide range of digital technology and so was able to incorporate more advanced ideas into my research and planning. I also acquired a new Canon 5D camera to better the quality of my shots. So for this task, I created two ancillary tasks of a website and a film poster. This meant researching existing websites and film posters and analysing them, as well as watching YouTube videos to help me learn about the different software I was using: Wix.com was a favourite in website making and Photoshop was common when creating posters. I discovered that the changes in digital technology over recent years have had significant impact on the style of artists’ websites: most of them are now ‘mobile-friendly’ with a very clear and simple interface to enable interaction with the small screen of a smartphone. This helped me to choose Wix.com to create my website, as it has the ability to be viewed as a mobile version. I made a mock website and magazine advertisement to develop my skills in using both types of software. I used my own pictures from tumblr and instagram to practise using the software to edit the pictures, such as adding text, filters and experimenting with lighting. I was able to upload these to my blog to get feedback from focus groups, which then informed my planning of the real thing. I also set up social media accounts connected to my website as this is conventional for film companies: twitter, facebook and YouTube. I wanted to use as much digital technology as possible to make my products accessible to my audience of young digital natives. Progressing from AS, this time I made an animatic of my storyboard and posted it to my blog so that I could collect feedback and see exactly how long my shots should last and what shots would actually look effective in the project as a whole. Finally, I created a group chat in Whatsapp to communicate with my performers and production team to organise shoot dates. This worked better as we don’t tend to use facebook any more for communication with our peers.
During the production of my A2 task, for my ancillary tasks, as I had developed my skills in the use of Photoshop through my props including a poster, so I was able to imagine how I was going to use my image in my final film poster and bear that in mind while setting up my photoshoot with my actresses like Tamara. Also, when building my website I was able to use the feedback from my initial practice to develop my skills. While setting up social media accounts for my actress , I researched numerous social media accounts of similar existing actresses and found that they use their account to promote and update fans on their latest movies, alongside mundane everyday updates such as sharing instagram photos of their breakfast or rehearsal ‘on set’ to let fans know that they are producing new music and create a buzz to pique their interest.
At post-production at A2, after taking iMovie as far as I could, I then edited some sections of my music video on Final Cut Pro. This was new software for me, but after iMovie it was not too much of a challenge to learn the editing techniques. Finally, to make my evaluations of my A2 portfolio as creative as possible, I used different kinds of digital technology, including Prezi, motion, final cut and photoshop. Rather than handing out a paper-based survey to my focus groups as I did at AS, this time I used SurveyMonkey which enabled to reach a much larger audience as I posted the link to survey on facebook, twitter, whatsapp and over email.
In conclusion, over the two years of the course, I feel I developed my skills in digital technology significantly, enabling me to realise my creative ideas and make four very successful products.
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