Development from AS to A2

The development from AS to A2 is vast for our group and for us individually.

The group development areas are in:

• Media technologies
• Research/planning
• Experimenting

My personal developmental areas are in:

• Analysing
• Final Cut Express skills

 As a group we have used a variety of media technologies in order to help us represent work within our blogs. A new media we all used was Prezi, which helped use to create presentations in new ways. Another is wrodle to produce word clouds and brainstroms; this prgrame became very useful in the research stage where ideas were envoling because we could show how come idea brought upon another.
These were the two main tools used however there were more; which offered different uses.
The reason for exploring these new technologies was to showcase our work differently to last year which shows our progression over a year as we are able to write a blog as well as keep up with the lastest media technologies. This year After Effects and Imovie were used by the group which shows progession as last year only Final Cut Express was used. We wanted to experiement with different programes because in year 12 we felt limited to one programe.

This year we developed the research stage, because last year it was clear that the research into our target audience was limited.  Last year we looked at cerificate ratings to see what the viewers are allowed to witness; whereas this year we researched our audience the same way but then followed on by finding out our target markets opinions, views and preferences. This was done through a generic questionaire which was later anaylsis then to add to this a thriller questionaire was given out then analysis by the group. This gave us indepth knowledge on our target audience which we later found out to be vital when producing the trailer.

As an individual I feel my progression is shown through in Final Cut Express and analysing. My personal aim this year was to gain knowledge in how to use Final Cut effectively and I believe I have managed to do this. Intially this year I had help with understanding how to use different functions and tools by Katie in our group as she was confident in using the programe. At the beginging of the editing process I helped, however was being told how to crop, cut, copy, paste and overlap footage in order to gain experience and confidence. Half way through I still wanted someone there for guidance on how to use tools and the right technique as I didnt want to mess it up. By the end of the process I was capable of using Final Cut Express on my own without help or guidance from the group.
The areas which I was able to work on were:

• Cutting footage
• Overlapping footage with text and music
• Copying and pasting footage from different programes onto Final Cut
• Changing the duration of footage
• Changing the speed of footage
• Moving Text around
• Changing the pitch of footag

This shows the transistion from last year becuase in year 12 I was unable to use the programe which being told what buttons to press and how to move footage from one time to another.

Another area in which I have shown personal progression is my general analysis skills. I found this quite challenging last year when knowing how to integrate it into our project. This year I have been able to throroughtly anaylse text and imagines to ascertain their true meanings.

To conlcude, I think we as a group and individuals have shown progression in a number of areas within this subject. Thinking back to last year when making a two minute film opening we only used the facilites and tools given to us, such as Final Cut Express. However, this year we have expanded our programes used and learned how to use After Effects on our own; whereas Final Cut we had a tutorial in. This resulted in the end product being more sucessful this year because we were able to experiement to find the best way possible on different programes to either create effects, lengthen footage, import etc. Combining group and individual progression was effective in highlighting the progression made, because we all showed signs of improvement in key areas such as Final Cut Express. By combining progression in a variety of areas it helped with the sucess of our group as we were able to work at a faster pace becuase we were not only familar with programes and the process but more advanced.
For us as a group; experiementing for with new programes worked for our group effectively because we created a better overall package than last year. For us as a group we played it safe last year in a variety of ways such as camera angles, story line, the message etc. The effectiveness of our developement over the year was shown by audience feedback in all the areas. Audience feedback was much more postive which is shown with the responses in other blogs. By evalutating the package myself I feel we followed conventions tightly and kept tight controls when deciding as we always reverted back, to whether it tied in with conventions. This helps me justify: that overall we are stronger and more advanced this year.