Personal Skills Audit

	Skills acquired	How did these skills contribute to the creation of your product?	How will you develop these skills during the A2 project?
Digital technology -        What equipment/software packages did you use to produce your production?	- Panasonic Camera - Tripod - Live Text	The Panasonic cameras’ we used to shoot the footage. These were rubbish quality to I hope to develop this skill this year with better cameras. We used the tripod last year to be able to get still shots. I think that I have already developed this skill throughout the shooting sessions prior to this year and couldn’t develop it further. I used Live Type last year as we used it to make rolling credits for out thriller opening sequence. This is good programme, but I don’t see how we can use it this year.	We have new cameras for this year and I hope to be able to broaden the technicality by being able to record Shallow and Deep focus. Hopefully these camera with be better overall picture quality.
Post production -        What software did you use to create your production? -        Discuss specific features of the software.	- Final Cut - Photoshop - Garage band	We used final cut to edit our overall pieces. This took a couple of practices and so we used this programme to also edit and put together our rough cut and animatic. When using Photoshop last year, we only used it to produce our company logo. I have used it previously and find it hard to use. So I am going to focus on my Photoshop skills for this year. I used Garage band previously to edit and put together our thriller sequences’ background music. I used it for fades and a smooth transition from one piece of music to the other. This went well, but we might use it this year, in which case I will have to improve on my technicality if I want our video to be convincing.	We will have to use this programme this year also to edit and polish out music videos. Because this year topic is going to be more adventurous, I will hopefully be able to experiment with using effects such as fades and transitions etc. Photoshop is a hard programme to use, in my opinion, and so I am going to use it this year, to make our group’s music video more professional. Garage band may have to be used this year, in that case I would like to improve on using this so that our coursework looks more polished and professional.
Research and Planning -        What tasks did you complete when preparing to film your sequence? -        How did your planning help the smooth progression of your film?	We carried out certain research tasks that helped us to make a decent film opening, these included conventions of a typical thriller opening, the stereotypical thing included. We done other tasks were we had to identify what order typical credits roll. For example, is the Producer or the Director of the film shown first? Then we had to arrange or set of credits accordingly.	Carrying out certain parts of research helped the production of a good sequence, because it told you what to include, it make you aware of what professionals so in order to make a decent film overall, even though we were only making the opening.	We will be carrying out more research this year on how certain music videos are put together and what the conventions are.
Using conventions of real media texts -        Which texts did you analyze? -        Did you take any inspiration from the conventions found from your research?	We took a lot of conventions from research and included them in our own film, these were things such as darkness and eerie music. We think that we added these correctly. But it would be unrealistic to use blood and gore especially in just an opening sequence. We analyzed classic films like Phycho and Rear Window. Even to more recent films like Secret Window, and Fight club. We analyzed these to get a better idea of what to include in our overall piece.	These skills that I had during the course of last year, did help us make more of a professional opening sequence. As without that research that we had carried out prior to think about a sequence narrative wouldn’t have followed the typical stereotypes of thrillers.	I will expect to be doing this again this year, as without doing this I will be unaware of the typical conventions of a Rock music video, which I am hoping to create. I know from watching them in my own free time that they mostly always in include a live performance and they have a cross-cut to a narrative. I will have to carry out more research in lesson and outside of class to before properly aware of my conventions and how I can use them in my own music video.
Creativity - Were our ideas for your portfolio imaginative and unique or did you adhere to conventions?	I think that we done both use the conventions and use our own ideas last year and this contributed to make a decent opening sequence. We had to use the typical conventions as this is what made our film look professional as we had researched camera angles and sound techniques that made our film look more skilled, but on the other hand we used our own ideas to make our film our own. Although, apart from the opening sequence we didn’t really think about what was going to happen in the rest of the film in detail as we weren’t shooting that and in which waste would have been a waste of time.	Using conventions definitely made our thriller sequence stereotypical and fit in the thriller genre guidelines. But we did use most of own imagination to make our film stand out and become more defined.	I think that following conventions that we have found out during research is especially important this year when creating out music video because it is going to have to follow a certain genre, this is the same as last year, but a music video can quickly become another genre by only inputting a few extra ideas. So we are going to have to follow the genre guidelines in that way. Although I do want to include intertexual aspects that I’ve seen in other rock videos, it will obviously include my own ideas and imagination as we can’t copy other existing products.