Developing Skills from AS to A2

At the beginning of AS Media was a new subject to me so i hadn't really had a lot of experience with anything. During that year i learnt many new things with cameras and particularly editing. This year as i have had experience with the cameras and editing i am a lot more comfortable with it and as a group we have been a lot more relaxed and adventurous. Last year as we were all beginning we were very simple with our ideas and stuck to original things and always chose the 'safe' options. This year however as we now knew our way with the hardware and software this enabled us to think a lot more about storylines and perfecting the image of our trailer, magazine and poster.

At the beginning of our teaser trailer we had close-ups of four boys. Last year we may have only used mid-shots as this would have been easier and we would have felt more comfortable. But this year we felt that we knew when it was acceptable for close-ups to be used and how they should be portrayed, especially for comical effect, in our trailer.

Continuity was something we were a lot more aware of as well this year. Last year we had do to some re-filming as we hadn't quite got all the parts that we had wanted. This affected some scenes as some parts were different in the lighting of that day. It wasn't a major issue in the end but to avoid any major problems like that this year we made sure we did all of our filming on one day and had all the props we needed with us.

Also our research was a bit better this year as we had more direction of what we were looking for and as we were confident with our filming and editing skills this time we could afford to spend more time on our storyline and ideas for the poster and magazine. This helped a lot with our poster and magazine as these were something we didn't do last year and so we had to carefully prepare for them.

Last year with our editing we encountered a problem where we had filmed some of our movie in the HD settings of our camera. As we hadn't had much experience we didn't realise this until editing. But with a little help we solved the problem by using a simple Pinnacle tool where you could zoom in and fit the film to screen size. We also had the same problem this year but it didn't matter as we learnt from last year and we knew exactly what to do so we didn't need to re-film or worry or even waste time over it. We simply dealt with it and moved on.