Skills review

Research and planning 

From last year I have realised how important research and planning is for the whole project and how it's the basis of everything and how we also tend to refer back to it throughout. To do this successfully me and my partner realised that we have to look into the conventions in more depth than we first had thought. We decided to watch a whole range of the 'British gangster' film openings and compare them with each other, in hindsight it would've been more effective if we looked at the sub-genres of gangster films and compared them to each other, this way the conventions of our chosen sub-genre would've been made clearer.

When we were planning we decided to use a story board to show how shots would be used and the course of the narrative, this was effective. However, I think that we would have gained more use out of it if we had included more detail, such as: use of lighting/mise en scene. We found out that we constantly changed our minds about the narrative and didn't necessarily change the story board, but this showed development and the process of changing things around to produce the final product. However,  if we had shown the process of what we had changed and created a story board for each development, it might of been more successful in showing development.

We discovered how target audience plays a huge role in the research and planning because we are basing the whole opening on their likes and dislikes of existing gangster films. Our audience research consisted of using Surveymonkey to create questionnaires to find out what kind of person would watch this genre of film. However, we had to re-do the questionnaire because our questions were not providing us with enough accurate information from then on we found it helpful when our audience included what conventions made it really feel like a gangster opening tot them. Through the results I created a voki depicting what kind of person would watch our film and the characteristics of them. 

Digital technology

In my AS year, i had developed my editing skills more than GCSE, we briefly learnt how to insert writing into a frame and for however long we wanted, this was helpful because we needed to involve credits. However, I wish I had taken the time to learn more about after effects and possibly make a proper logo for the company; this would’ve given the whole thing a more professional look. Some of the sound in our clips, such as: the scene where the character is talking was too quiet originally because we didn’t use a microphone. However, we then learnt from our mistakes and used a microphone when recording the character’s voice over which immediately sounded better. Because we never re-filmed the characters talking scene, we had to use editing software to improve the sound, but we found that it still sounded almost tinny.

I also used how to use video effects effectively, for example: transitions and colour.

Using conventions from real media texts

As my partner and I weren’t that familiar with gangster film conventions, we had to watch a lot of gangster film openings, these included: Layer Cake, Reservoir Dogs, e.c.t. I learnt how lighting is used a lot to represent characters, scenes and story lines, we took the inspiration from Layer Cake. However, one main convention that we challenged was that the main character was female, which is never seen in traditional gangster films which we were cohering to. We had to change the storyline somewhat so that the character had traditionally represented a female in some ways.

In A2, I would like to focus more on challenging conventions a little bit but to a certain extent because I feel as if it gives an element of surprise.

Creativity

One of the main ways I was creative during the earlier processes of creating a gangster film was when I story boarded our original idea for the film opening and drew, with stick figures the angle and position of the person and how they will be framed. The only regret I have was how I didn't change the story board as I went along.

The video transitions we mainly used were jump cuts and cross-dissolve, cross dissolve gave a really nice effect of one scene going into another, this kind of gave the impression that the scenes were happening at the same time which was the effect that we wanted. We also changed the colour to black and white which gave the impression of looking back into the past. This made the lighting more significant and with one scene, the only thing I would’ve had done better was that because we had to lighten it with the editing software, it became a little grainy, so the quality was compromised. Also, it was a contrast between the black and white scene with decent lighting which wasn't grainy and this gave an unwanted effect.

Post-production

After capturing the footage, we uploaded it to Adobe Premiere Pro; editing software, and had a hard time getting the clips we had to reach 2 minutes. The sound was hard to get right, we had to lower the level of sound gradually and to do this, and we zoomed right in on the sound clip and made small cuts which gave the effect of the sound gradually getting quieter or louder.