Post production. (Hammond)

AS- Task one

I used many tools for my AS including photoshop. I had never used this program before so getting used to the tools on it was. But after my teachers showed me what to do it worked well. The pros of this is that it helped to make my product look professional and helped with tidying things up. However the cons of Photoshop is that the program kept freezing or stopping and so this became very frustrating for me as i meant i had to do the same piece of work over and over again. Other tools i used would be cameras and computers. I used my own camera for the photos on my music magazine and my camera worked well and made my shots come out to be the best that they could be. However uploading them and using the computers was a slow process but in the end it was fine and i was able to use my photos easily. The main tools that i used for AS photoshop were tools uch as redeye. I found this tool very helpful  as it made the people in my pictures ook so much better and also they looked proffesional and you could see the emotion that i was trying to get across in the picture. The other tools i used were tools that helped to brighten up the mages and make them sharper so that they looked the best they could and so they also fit in with the look of my music magazine. As for tools that were not for my images i used a paint bucket to fill in the spaces with different colours and the pant bucket helped me to pick the specific colour hat i wanted.

A2 - task two

For A2 we created a music video and with it we did anciallary tasks which were to create a digipack and a magazind advert. The soft ware that was mainly used was final cut pro and photoshop. Final cut pro on the macs was brilliant to create our music video on. It was quick and very easy to use, everything was simple and was obvious of what i needed to do. I found i less stressful than photoshop as it automatically saved the work once something was changed. However photoshop was a weakness for the software. This is because i found it confusing a frustrating to use. It froze a lot which meant i lost bits of my work. Also the tools were not very clear to get used top but once i was used to it it was fine to use. My skills on phptoshop from AS to A2 have improved dramatically. This is because at AS i panicked and didnt know what to do if it froze and i was more scared of trying things out. However in A2 i was much more confident with it and i didnt need to the help of my teachers as much. The tools that i used within final cut pro were mainly the use of the colour for the flashbacks as for all the other shots i made surei had either got the natural lighting i wanted or i used a high end of light for the band shots. This is because i wanted my video to be as natural as possible. As for Photoshop i mainly used the same sort of tools as AS i just used some more artistic tools. For example, with the cricle on the back of my digipack, this was originally a painted circle, whereas when i used the artistic tool i made it look as though it had been messily drawn as this looked much better and fit in with the disign of my digipack much better.

Task three

Main task- The post production for my music video would be to change the lighting for where laura stood and what they day was like to weather we chose to film or not. As for the inside we had a band room anyway which was light and had many lights in it which made th videoing easier. We then uploaded the videos and changed some of the colours of some opf the videos for the flash backs as we neede them to be black and white to show that they were flashbacks.

Ancilary task- I took all of the photos myself again a plain white wall for the band and had them stand a a specific way as i wanted them to look coll but also have their personalities come across. As for the front cover i use a photo tent as this made laura stand out better and made it look more proffesional for the front. As for the other band photos inside th digipack i used the band room from the video so that the audeince could recognise them and also show what they do as a band. I them uploaded them all on the photoshop and mainly messed around with thr brightness, saturation, and the sharpness.

750 essay write up

Detail how your post production skills developed between your AS ad A2 coursework.

I learnt and used many thing for the post production of my media products in both AS and A2. This  includes both soft ware and research before actually completing my main products.

For AS the post production skills i used was photo shop. I was very new to this as i had never encountered it before and so to use a program like this was hard. As i went along my AS year in making my music magazine my skills did improve a lot as i got used to the program and i also had help of my media teacher to help me improve what i was doing on the program. As for A2 my skills on the photo shop program improved dramatically and i was able to get on with the tasks on my own. An example of a tool in which my skills improved would be the way i changed the brightness and the saturation of my pictures as before i just left them to how they were and did not experiment that much.
My post production skills improved massively on using a camera for my media work. In AS i just took some shots and didn't use a variety of angle or settings on the camera i just stuck to what i knew.

However for A2 i used many angles for the camera and i looked more deeply in to the way the image looked on the camera face and so i changed the lighting in the room of which i was taking the video or photo. This shows how my skills had developped as i was thinking about what i was doing more and was thinking of how i can make it better. Whereas in AS i would just take the shots and not be confident enough to think about anything else.  As for my skills in A2 on photoshop in A2 i managed to use my skills very well on the different tools within photo shop. For example the magnetic laso tool, for this i cut out images to make them fit better to the layout. Before i had never used this tool before and so when i did it was brand new to me but because me skills in post production had improved i was able to get the hand of the magnetic laso tool quickly and easily.

In As we made a prctive music video and this was to help get used to how we shot a music video and then to help us get used to using the video editing program for when we were to come and do our own media videos in A2. Some of the tools on the program that we used were very confusing and the program seemed to be quite slow and confusing. It also took us a long time to do but was good. It was good as it allowed me to get used to the way of how to upload the videos onto the computer and then the main bit was the lip syncing as this was hard to do. So to get used to it was the best part of doing that task. Then when it came to making our own music video in A2, we were actually given a completly new program to use for the video. However this was not a bad things as the program worked better and also i already new how to upload and do the small simple things because of the practice in AS. Therefore when it came to doing my music video in A2 it was muc easier as i got to use different kinds of tools on the program. Some of the tools i  used were tools such as slowing the speed of a video. For example on two occations in our video did we decied to have a slow motion and to be able to use this tool easily and make it work well shows how much my skills in post production have developed. Another way in which my skils have developed is that way of how quickly i adapted to the new program that i had never been on before and i used it fine. Also by being more coonfident about how to use the programs, i was able to look for more things to helps make my video better. For example, finding different colour effects to add to the emotion we were trying to give off in the video. In my AS task i did not look for any tools like this is just uploaded and synced the video as i did not feel confident enough to do much more than that. Whereas for A2 i was able to do much more because of how comfy i was with using the programs. This shows how my skills then developed from post production in AS to then my post production skilss in A2.