Samantha McCaul

Last year my group and I made an opening sequence to a film; it was about a boy losing someone he loved. This year a new group and I created a music video for Chase and Status’ song ‘Time’. I found last year’s project easier mainly because we had a set story board and a clear idea what we were filming so we could go out and film the footage; whereas this year we knew what we wanted but came up with new ideas all the time so filmed them along the way. Also this year we had a song to fit clips to in editing so we had to fit the shots with the timing and beats of the music which was more stressful but easier in a way because we knew what we had to fit in where and what type of shots we wanted for different sections in the music. The music project for A2 I got more involved with the editing side of the project because I wanted to learn how to use ‘Final cut pro’, also Rameil and I had clear ideas and thoughts about how we wanted things to look; even though he did a large amount of the editing I learnt how to put effects and transitions on the different clips to create the film.

The ‘blog’ this year was a bit easier to understand because we are using the same software as last year, also I knew the basic information we needed to post onto the it and bring in some of the criticisms, difficulties and positive feedback from last year’s blog to make this one better and have all the information and research we need to get good marks on this part of the project. A new task this year was the ‘digi-pack’ where we had to make four panels for a CD case and an advertising poster to promote our video and it’s song. This was good because as a photography student I could use my skills to copy the Chase and Status style pictures of a simple black and white photo with bright, block, bold writing for the title and artist. However, some ideas didn’t work in the way we had thought it would look so I went with the plain but effective watches on arms and purple writing. Even though last year our group thought it would be good to make a poster for our film so we tried it, this year we had to, so the rest of the group created the poster for this project.

In conclusion, some tasks were easier this year because I had experience of doing the same last year so I could improve in this project. However, there were more tasks this year which had deadlines, I found this difficult to collect everything we needed for each section to be able to hand it in on time –even though we did get everything in on the deadline, I feel if we had more time or sorted out the time limits and when we had to do things by more thoroughly we would have had an end product where all aspects of it were of equal grades and effort put into them-. With this I am definitely concentrating on my time keeping more for new projects especially for university.