Skills developed in my AS year

My AS year was the first time I have ever done a media course and so I thought that I might find it difficult when it came to learning how to use some of the technologies and programmes that were new to me. But because I also done film studies as an AS course when it came to making my thriller opening I already had some experience and found it a lot easier. Having said that I also learned a lot of new techniques and how to use some of the other programmes.

For example how to use the camera I learnt in my film studies lesson so when it came to my media coursework I already had some experience. Examples are the basic skills such as switching it on and off, inserting the battery and the memory card, how to zoom in and also how to play back what we have just recorded. However when creating a preliminary task I learned how to adjust the lightning and how to use the lighting tool if we needed it when our location became too dark.

I also had some experience if Final Cut Pro, as I had to use it for my film studies. Through this programme we got to import our video clips, and edit them into our thriller opening. I learned a lot of new skills when creating our opening, for example how to edit the appearance of clips in order for them to create a different feeling, also I learned how to include transitions, even though we didn’t use many in our thriller opening.

I also used Soundtrack Pro in my film lessons but had very little knowledge about it, so when creating my thriller opening I learned a lot of new techniques. It was the programme Soundtrack Pro that we used to create the music/soundtrack to our thriller. This part of the coursework is what I found hardest as there was so many sounds to choose from, in the end we used different ones and mixed them together at times to create suspense. After we created our final soundtrack we imported it into Final Cut Pro.

Me and my group used the programme Live Type to create out titles for our thriller opening. The programme allowed us to create unique and different effects in order for our opening to look unique, it also had a choice of transitions that made our thriller more distinctive. We had to create each text one by one and then insert them into Final Cut Pro.

I also learned how to use some more simple programmes like Handbrake, this allowed us to convert our final thriller opening into mp4 and so then we could post in on our blog. We also learned how to use the Video Drive, which is where saved all our work so that next lesson we didn’t have to be on the same computer.