Development

Since I began my A level at AS I have gained a lot of skills. I began my course by making a magazine for a college magazine. This involved me using a camera to get photos to feature on the cover. This made me be creative in thinking about where abouts to take the photo and who to be in the photo. This also introduced me to the use of mise-en-scene and got me to think about things like costume and props. I then learned how to use Photoshop. This began with me learning how to get up a blank page of A4 and how to upload items such as photos onto the page. I also learned how to edit photos and change things like the contrast and brightness to improve the quality of the photo. It also taught me to crop photos and how to change the size of images.

Photoshop also taught me how to make use of being able to use layers when creating a document and I progressed these skills throughout my as course when creating a music magazine. With the use of layers it is a lot easier to make an image look better and it is easier to create something that looks good as you can change things separately rather than having to change the whole image. It also let me be more creative as you can move things around and see what looks better. It also helped me become more creative and I learned how to input text onto a document and I used my creative skills in doing so by testing fonts and colours to see which looked the best.

I also learned how to use blogger. This was different to me as I had never used it before and I learned how to do things like post a blog and upload a photo. This made things easier as I could access blogger whenever I needed to and I could add more work when I needed to I also used the internet a lot for research, visiting things like magazine websites to gain ideas of how I could create a good cover, contents page and double page spread. I also used word to type up a lot of my work. I also created a PowerPoint about music industries; this improved my creative skills by making me put together information in a specific way so that the PowerPoint looked presentable.

In A2 I used blogger in a more productive way; I did this by using blogger to advance my skills. I used blogger to create a questionnaire so that I could get feedback from my target audience to see what sort of people they are and what they like/dislike, this helped me figure out what sort of things I should include on my music video. To plan my music video I used a storyboard to draw up my ideas, this helped me become more creative as I had to think about what to include in my video and how I could make it effective. I had to think about what I could use to match the lyrics of my song and how I could give a clear narrative to the audience. I also used the internet more to look at music videos on YouTube. This helped as it gave my ideas as to what to include in my videos and to see what is effective and what is not. I also uploaded videos onto my blogger so that I could analyse them and get idea on how I could make my video.

I have also created a short film for a movie trailer in a group of 4. We spent a lot of time planning; we did this by creating a story board and coming up with ideas, as a group, so that we could make an effective video. We also come up with ideas for the sounds that we could put in the background and we decided to put a song in the background. We each had a turn at using the camera for a mixture of shots. We developed this as we went along as the first time we shot the movie trailer we make a few mistakes. This then gave us the confidence to go out and film the video again and to get thing right. We then uploaded our footage onto a computer and took turns in editing the footage. We all had our own ideas on how we could make the movie trailer effective and we all inputted our ideas. We did things like cut out parts of the video and mixed the shots up so that the juxtapositions were more effective. We also added text so that it fit the conventions of movie trailers.