1. Friday, 11 November 2016
Skills development
It is important to track the progress of my skills development during this course in order
to identify areas of improvement from the AS Media Studies coursework compared to the
A2 Media Studies coursework skills. I will consider how my skills have improved over
these two years. The two areas I will consider is creativity and digital technology.
Creativity
In order to create the most vibrant product which is unique from other students it is
important to research a lot of past documentaries through analysing not only the content
and ideologies that are presented in the documentary but also the codes and
conventions of the magazine. Last year, through producing a magazine front cover,
contents page and double page spread of an article I learnt the important of research
and planing in influencing decisions in production in order for my product to best fit my
target audience. At the start of the coursework for last year, I looked at Kerrang! and ---
magazine in order to understand the basic codes and conventions needed to produce a
magazine. This year I will look at more than two examples individually in order to get as
much independent knowledge and analysis on the codes and conventions of
documentaries. Through the knowledge of these codes and conventions, I can create a
documentary which is going to fit in with mainstream ideas but also see if there are any
gaps the documentaries that I have analysed. I can see if there is a audience gap or a
possible twist on a previous topic in order to create something interesting and unique for
my target audience. For example, I think it would be a creative idea if we looked at
maybe the stigma of video games and considered the reality of it. Instead of looking at
whether violence in video games does have an impact on teenagers and young children,
we can see what they personally think of video games
Digital Technology
Also, the development of skills in relation to digital technology is important to show an
improvement of skills in producing media products. This years coursework relies on
looking at video footage to pin point down certain aspects which could potentially be
included in our real documentary. The use of the edit decision sheet was very useful but
before that I did look do a draft of different timings when watching all of the footage to
see what I personally found potentially interesting and useful. The use of Premiere has
been an interesting experience as at first I found it quite confusing to use in terms of all
the different aspects of editing and the different sections of the screen but soon got used
1
2. Friday, 11 November 2016
to it. I think it is a very useful software to use and really allows you to focus on a variety
of different elements of visual and audio footage so you can change and manipulate
exactly how you want the clips to be. At this stage, I certainly have not looked at all the
tools but the one I find most helpful at the moment is the audio gain option when you
right click the cursor. This will be extremely useful when we come to editing the
montages of our vox-pops as I have noticed that many of them have different sound
levels. The audio gain option will be a great way to make sure that they are all a
consistent level, increasing the clarity and professionalism of our product. I look forward
to learning more about Premiere in the weeks to come as well as using InDesign for
when we construct our magazine article.
2
