Skills Review

Research and Planning

- In the research and planning stage I looked at the Gangster genre and learned all about it to help me out when it came to planning and production stages. The research went from learning the history of the gangster genre to the conventions you see in them. Then to link it all to the audience and why these conventions help the audience understand the genre. In the planning stage I linked all these ideas together to come up with suitable locations and music to fit to the gangster genre.

-From doing the research and planning stages I learnt all about the conventions of the gangster genre and how to link these into the planning stage such as the location I chose which had to be an urban city location as to link to conventions, I also learnt how important the target audience is in what you plan as if the audience doesn't understand why you've chosen to do something the way it is it will leave them confused.

-The way I want to improve from last year is to take into account the target audience more it was something I never took that seriously until the initial feedback last time so if I take it into account from the start there will be less confusion and less mistakes made. The notes I made on research and planning last year I felt were lacking in places so this year I want to try harder in these stages.

Using Conventions From Real Media Texts

-From all the research carried out in the research and planning stage I learnt about the conventions of the gangster genre things such as.

-Mise en scene: The location was nearly always urban city scapes,  the lighting was nearly always dark but we learnt the hard way it was hard to incorporate this into our film opening as it was always to dark. The characters in gangster films were nearly always men the was a complete lack of females most of the time or they had such little roles it didn't matter.

-Sound: The music was nearly always parallel to the scene with the exception of  Quentin Tarantino who was famous for his contrapuntal sound. Which was something we tried to incorporate into our film opening.

-Shots: gangster film were prone to a lot of two shots and mid-shots as to show who was in charge and the relationship between the two characters. There was a lot of  

-Editing: The editing was quite continuous and at times was quite fast paced depending on the scene the typical gangster film opening had no fancy editing unless it was newer it mostly had quite basic editing techniques such as fades and black outs whereas the newer openings had more fancy cuts and edits to comply with technology.

-I learnt at this stage that is was important to incorporate a lot of conventions form previous films into my film opening as it made it easier to not only to not only show the conventions but to make it clear and easy to understand.

Creativity

-The creativity aspect of the film opening is the section I liked the best, this was the section in which I thought of the ideas of the opening and to think of an idea that would be fun and visual pleasing this meant taking suitable shots with the lighting, framing and sound all into account to make a decent and fun film opening.
-From my experience of doing the film opening I learnt the importance of creativity to create my own unique film opening. However I also learnt that sometimes you can be to creative and have no way to fit your ideas into the film opening without it seeming too much. I also learnt that creativity is not just only thinking of fun ideas and stuff but it's also to apply this creativity to the location choices and the music used even to the shot types used to emphasize the creativity of the shots.
-This time around I would like to improve the quality of the shots used as some of the lighting in the shots in the opening were a bit off so this time I want to use different techniques to ensure the shots are of great quality and to avoid doing the creative side of things too quickly and to ensure a more professional looking finished piece.

Digital Technology

-During the production I learnt a lot about using the video cameras and the editing software, I had never used a video camera much before as I preferred to use normal digital cameras this was a new experience which I learnt a lot from. I learnt how to use the camera with the tripod and how to keep the  camera steady on the tripod. I also learnt the importance of varying shot types and that it's important to take several shots to ensure that if one doesn't go well it means we have a back up this was only something I learned halfway through the shooting when we realized we had to re-shoot everything.
-This time around I want to make sure I take several takes for each shoot to cut down on the amount of re-shoots I have to do I also want to use a bigger variety of shoots with the lighting and location good in all of them.

Post Production

-After we took the footage we had to upload it to Premier Pro to edit it. This was the aspect of the film production I learnt most from as I hadn't had much experience with film editing. I learnt all about cutting the clips to appropriate sizes as to ensure to shot is to long as to keep the audience entertaining and interested. I also learnt about how to clip and cut the audio of the clip to cut out unwanted sounds or silences so the audio runs smoother.
-This time around I want to use different effects and play around with the program more because we only used the program for simple cuts and edits and I want to be more creative with what I do.