Media Nationals Unit 3 Level 2 Production Evaluation
My media production group consisted of me (Jess), Rachel and Henry.
Working in a group meant that we could split the work load so tasks could get completed in a shorter period of time. Group work strengths were that we could come up with overall better idea’s due to us all contributing in each task to ensure the best idea’s were chosen. Tasks that group work worked well for were Brainstorming for idea’s, filming the video and editing the video. However, negative points about group work included that more written work would get done as we all felt we could concentrate on the work more alone. We chose a balance between working as part of a team and individually to make sure work was produced that was of good quality and quantity. Choosing roles in the group was an easy task as we explained our individual strengths and weaknesses and based our chosen positions on these qualities. My role was the scribe which involved me to take note of any idea’s we had that would help with the production. I chose to take on this role as I felt that my English skills were strong and I was the most organised and responsible for keeping track of any good idea’s and writing them down for planning. I also played the 2nd actor when filming the music video as well as inputting any idea’s I thought would work well for any shots. Rachel was given the role of the sub-writer and main actor. When filming was not taking place, Rachel helped me write down all of the important idea’s that would help with our production. Rachel was again confident with her English skills so this role suited her abilities. Once ready to film, Rachel played the main actor throughout the video. Rachel is confident and takes part in Drama lessons so we felt she was the most suited to this role. Henry’s role was the video director and editor. Henry chose to do this as he had had experience with using a camera and came up with some good shots that we could incorporate within the music video production. Henry then took charge of the video editing with me and Rachel inputting our idea’s to make the final product look as good as possible. We chose these specific roles to ensure each person never felt left out and to balance out the amount of work each of us did. Overall i feel the roles worked really well and evidence to prove this is all the work was fully completed on time to the best of our abilities.
Although I felt our roles worked well, there were some weaknesses within the group, so we had to compromise in situations to ensure everything worked out during the production. Some weaknesses included completing tasks on time. This may be due to the group work which was a slow process as we got distracted. However, the work we did produce was to the best of our abilities. Another small issue was that a lot of the shots we filmed had to be retaken due to confidence mistakes in some scenes. This issue was overcome as the production went on. Organising the tasks was a negative part of the production too as if any of the group members were absent, we couldn’t always access the work. This then lead to us missing the production dates. Though immature behaviour as also a slight problem, this did help us communicate more as a group and so we all had an equal input of idea’s.
We first decided we wanted to do a music video for our Media Production because our skills matched the qualities needed to create a music video. We then chose a song that we thought would be suitable to get scenes for. We changed the song a few times until we clicked on a song called ‘Alicia Keys - Doesn’t Mean Anything’. After we listened through the song a few times, we started the task of deciding what the video would be about. We took into account of our location and the availability of settings and props etc. We also thought about the amount of time we had to complete the production. As we were nearly always in school when we would work on our production, it became clear that having a school based theme for the music video would be the best choice. After listening to the song again with the amount of idea’s that we had so far gathered, we needed to expand on it further. We thought about the genre of the song and compared other music video’s with the same genre for inspiration. We chose the idea of bullying in school for the video as the song was quite slow and had some depressing parts. The song started to have a positive outlook towards the end, so it became clear that in our music video, the bullying would stop and the victim would make a ‘friend’. So far the production had gone well and we were up to date with the tasks. After having a solid plan in our head, we allocated roles in our group. This wasn’t a hard task as everybody knew their strengths and weaknesses. Before we could start filming, we made a hand drawn storyboard to show all of the scenes to shoot so we had a plan to guide us through the shooting. Having this made the whole production easier to manage as we all knew what we were doing in front of the camera. My role was to complete the written tasks first before we could start shooting, such as meeting agendas, equipment list and production schedule. Henry and Rachel helped me with this as their roles in the group production were to come later on. I think to improve this, we could have added more detail into the tasks first hand rather than having to go back and add more information to them later. By now we had a good idea of what our music video was going to look like. We set a date to start filming and made sure we stuck to this date to avoid messing up the production schedule. We starting filming on the set date and it went well for the first few shots. However, we had to re-shoot some of the shots due to unnecessary smiling/commentary/recording faults. This made us behind schedule during the filming part of the production. We also filmed some shots that weren’t needed in the music video and weren’t on our storyboard. If I was to do the production for a second time, I would stick to the storyboard plans to ensure all the shots we needed for definite were filmed. We were finally assured that we had collected all of the shots needed for the music video. Henry then captured the video’s on the iMac and imported them into Final Cut Express for us to put together to edit. We all had an equal input towards the video editing part of the production, but the finishing touches were made by me (Jess). After we were satisfied that our video had been edited, we rendered it into a single file and uploaded it to our blog (Along with all of the other written tasks). Overall I feel the production went well, however if we were to do the production again, I would make sure we collected enough shot idea’s beforehand, then practice them before shooting the clip for real to make sure we didn’t mess it up. This would save time and overall put less pressure on the group to finish the task on time.
We used a range of techniques throughout the production. We mainly used these techniques whilst shooting and editing the music video. Whilst shooting the video, we filmed using the 180 degree rule when shooting multiple shots within one scene. This made the whole scene flow throughout giving the video a lifelike feel. The idea of using the montage shots gave the scene view points from different perspectives which were cut together to flow. Multiple techniques were used whilst editing the music video. To make the video as real life as possible, but without letting it drag on throughout unnecessary scenes, we used the idea of an ellipsis to break out the less important scenes without breaking the structure of the story within the video. We used the match on action technique when video editing so that the scene matched the emotion of the song, e.g. When the depressing part of the song played, the shots had a negative feel/look to them (where bullying occurs). When the song got more pleasing towards the end, the video got happier, which is the storyline (so this song was an appropriate choice). Temporal discontinuity was used to match the soundtrack and the visual content, such as when the bullying scene was taking place, a fade-out was used to give the idea that the scene went on for a long period of time. A fade was also used during the transition between the negative and position scene with the fade of black and white to colour. This emphasises the video making each idea stronger.
