AS Coursework Review

Practical Task
In AS we did 3 practical tasks the first one that we did was the copy of a music video. We used a camera phone in order to create this piece, I learnt a lot from this task. The first thing that I learnt was that its a lot harder than you think you have to get the same length shots as the other video and the same angle need to be used and as this was at the beginning of the year we hadn't learnt much about camera angles. Also I learnt that its hard to do all the work by yourself as i worked on my own i found it time consuming and difficult to do the film and the editing for the short clip.Whilst i was editing the videos i found it difficult to get used to the programme and found it hard to use and it took me a lot longer to edit than i wanted it too. Furthermore I learnt that you need to record a lot more footage than you think so that if when you put it onto the computer it doesn't look good you have a backup video that you can use. From my copy i wish that i could redo it as the attention to mise en scene wasn't very good and the scenery didn't look anything like what it did in the video. Below is my copy of Ed Sheerens Bloodstream


The next task that i did was the prelim task from what i leant from the copy task i used that and made the prelim a lot better, first of all i worked with Chloe this allowed me to have more time to edit and not to stress to much about the work load. We used a samsung pro 816 in order to film our piece, this provided a much better quality of video and you could really see the difference between the phone camera and the camera we used this time. Also from our copy to our prelim we had to plan more how we did wanted the film to be because we had to make the film from scratch so we had to plan each scene. From this we started to create our short film, i found out that the planning is very important and it makes it a lot easier for you to create a film because this way you can show the actors as well which means that they will understand it more and understand what we wanted them to do. I think that our planning process for this short film could have been better we did do some but we could have made it more in detail so that it was clearer and we knew it was defiantly going to work. Another thing that we learnt when we made our prelim task was that the editing would be a lot harder as we wanted the character to speak and when i uploaded the videos to the computer the sound wasn't very good or clear, we could have gone back and re filmed it with a microphone or we could have re recored their voices and put it over the top. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to do either of those, so next time if we have speech we need to make sure we leave time to re film or use a microphone when filming.



Finally we went on to our final piece this took a long time but it turned out really well in the end. First of all we had to start to plan it i thought that our overall planning wasn't very organised as we didn't make a full story bored and we were just generating ideas but not actually writing them down and trying them out to see if they would work. I think that if we were to do the planning stage again I would make sure a couple of storyboards got done so that when we went to the location of the film we knew exactly what we were doing and how we wanted it to look. We did planning for where we wanted it to be as we went around and took photos of possible locations and saw which ones where the best to create the atmosphere we wanted. Another area that we didn't really consider that much was costumes, the actors came in ordinary clothes which is ok for what we wanted them for, as we wanted to portray them as 2 average teenagers. We did tell them that they need a back bag to make it as though they have just come from school/friends house and they are walking home in the dark. I think that if I were to do the costumes again I would make a Pinterest page of ideas and then generated a good costume idea. I think that overall for our second video made from scratch I don't think it went that badly and because we choose horror as the genre it was easier to make and didn't take as much planning because as long as you have the right lighting and the sound you'll be alright.