Question Plans by Fred and Josh

1) How has your understanding of real media conventions developed over the A-level media course?

• Thriller: Developed certain cinematography techniques such as Blocking (hiding characters identity) giving an air of mystery to the antagonist (badman). Framing, which uses one character in the frame alone, can be used to show the victim (protagonist) alone and vulnerable, or the antagonist as powerful or creepy. Over the shoulder shot (OTS).
  
• Media Language used to analyse the Thriller opening (Cinematography, Editing, Mise-en-Scene, Sound)
  
• Cinematography: Panning used to show scenery, set scene, and provide element of fear. Close ups used to show fear in the protagonist's face. long shot used to show scenery and protagonist .
• Editing: Used continuity to improve flow.
• Mise-en-scene: Scene genre and characters all introduced in thriller opening. Body language used to show Fear in protagonist.
• Sound: non-diegetic sound used for soundtrack, created in Garageband.
• We used a lot of the same micro-elements for our music video.

2) What decisions have you made during post production stages and how have these affected your work?

• We added effects to our video such as ghosting and black and white. These made our video look more professional. The ghosting effect slowed down Josh B's hand movements and made them in time with the beat, which went with Goodwin's Analysis, point 3.

3) What are the pro's and con's of the various research and planning strategies you used?

• One of the planning strategies we used was the storyboard. This took quite a long time to plan and draw every single different scene in order on the different squares. We didn't follow the plan much either, as we didn't finish it.
• We used YouTube to research some music videos and pick up some tips and gain inspiration for our own project. One of the issues we had with YouTube was the problems with copyright, and not being allowed to post their videos on our blog.
• We used Blogger to put all of our research in a place where we could read it easily and keep it all in 1 place. The pro's of this were that we had no boundaries of what we could post. It was a central place where we could bring together digital examples of our research and planning and present it in a coherent form. However, when we had a lot of posts on the blog and wanted to find an older post, we had to search the older posts by going back lots of pages, which sometimes took a while. Navigation was tiresome.
• The Internet is absolutely vital to our project because it is the root of all research with websites such as YouTube, Blogger and Google. Google did cause us some problems, however, as when we searched 'dripping' in Google images we were met with images of an inappropriate nude nature (By the way, we searched for work purposes. lol)