Explain how your post-production skills have developed over time, and how this has contributed to your media outcomes.

Over the two years that I have been studying Media, my post-production skills have improved drastically. Before starting in Year 12, I had very little knowledge about the media and the only editing that I had completed was on Windows Movie Maker and these edits included only basic transitions or straight cuts; there was no use of special effects at all and it was not very creative. When we first started media we were given a basic editing task to get us used to Adobe Premiere Pro; we imported some clips of dancing animals into the software and then edited it. This task was supposed to be a learning experience rather than a creative one and so we only used basic cuts and transitions and some colour correcting effects. From this, we learnt how the editing software worked and the basics of how to use the shots that we import in. Next, we looked at the film opening for the film 'Juno'. This opening included a soundtrack of a song in the background and the main character walking around with cuts and transitions in time to the music. The shots also have a cartoon effect on them. Our task was to try and recreate this film opening, in groups. we therefore had to film all of the shots, import them, add special effects to them to make them look like a cartoon and then cut in all of the right places. We then added the real opening to the corner of the screen so that they could play side-by-side.  This was a much more creative task, to an extent, because we had to make more corrections to the video, however, this was not as creative as it could have been because we were copying something else rather than coming up with the ideas ourselves. When it came to making our own film openings for our preliminary task, this gave us some more creative freedom because we had to come up with our ideas ourselves. But, since we were still editing novices, we found that the ideas we came up with were very hard to recreate on Adobe Premiere and they ended up being full of glitches and errors. However, we did develop our skills and creativity massively during this task. Finally, we had to create our film opening construction. Although, we could make a film opening for any genre, we were limited in our creativity to a certain extent since we had to make a video suitable for our genre and this meant that we had many creative limitations. Our film opening was effective, but the quality was not as good as it could have been. If we were to re-create it now, it would be of a much higher quality. We used the film opening for 'Ghost Ship' to give us inspiration for our film opening. This opening included straight cuts like our opening but also some other interesting transitions that we did not include. We used only straight cuts and not interesting transitions at all, allowing the narrative to progress but not exemplifying our creativity to the fullest extent. As well as this, the sound quality was poor and the speech in the video could not be heard very clearly. If we were to re-create it now, we would add foley to the video to ensure that the speech could be heard easily over the music in the film opening. We also did not use any special effects other than making some shots black and white, and shots that were not the right colour tones were not corrected.

In Year 13, we were given many opportunities to get more creative with our editing. Firstly, we did a creative editing task where we filmed each other in different locations around the school and then edited them. We had to use a variety of more complex and creative editing techniques such as split screen, cloning, screen within screen and split-screen. This task allowed us to really experiment with different techniques and develop our understanding of Adobe Premiere and get more comfortable with the software. This was essential before we moved on to filming our music videos later in the year. Our preliminary task was to replicate approximately 30 seconds of a real life music video. We decided to use Charlie Puth's 'We Don't Talk Anymore' and this video involves a split screen throughout and the two shots cutting out of sync. This was an editing challenge because we had to ensure that the shots were timed perfectly and cut at exactly the right time. This meant that we needed to slightly alter the length of our shots post-production so that they matched the original video perfectly and cut in time with the music and the other shot on the split screen. This was an editing challenge because we never had to edit two videos, simultaneously, to music. This forced us to be much more creative and precise. This task gave us a great foundation for creating our own music video. We came up with all of the editing techniques that we were going to use in the video ourselves and this gave us complete creative freedom since you can apply almost any editing technique to a music video and it can work; we did not have the same restraints that we did when making the film opening. In our music video we used a variety of different techniques, such as adding an overlay and using a variety of interesting transitions. Another huge difference between our film opening and our music video was the amount of shots that we included. In our film opening, we used 15 shots in two minutes; for our music video we used 66 shots in the same amount of time. When researching we looked at the Foo Fighters' music video for 'The Pretender'. This music video offered many changes in pace, with some parts cutting quickly and others more slowly. This matched our song perfectly and we decided to include this in our own music video. This already clearly shows the difference in complexity between the two projects that we had to edit. We also had to put much more thought into the creativity that we put into the music video and had to spend a lot more time on it. This is because our music video needed to look professional, suit the genre that we had chosen and also have obvious synergy links to the website and digipak.

In Year 12, after making our film opening, we had to create a film poster to market our film. At this point we did not have any experience with editing photographs and so could not do this easily. We made the film poster on Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, this meant that we could not edit the photograph to the extent that we wanted to. Our film poster consisted of a photograph of the characters in the background and plain text on top. We had most of the photo in black and white and one character in colour. We did this to demonstrate the past and present themes and got the idea by looking at the 'Perfume' film poster. This had the majority of the poster in black and white and then some rose petals in red, with the title of the film on there and the actors’ names. We based our own film poster around this one. However, because we were limited with what we could do on Word, we were not able to edit the poster as much as we wanted to and our text was not easy to see at all.

In Year 13, we made the digipak and magazine cover in Adobe Photoshop. This meant that we had greater control over the process and could be much more creative with the layouts. We could also edit the photographs much more freely and colour correct them as needed. We also used Adobe Photoshop to remove the background of the rose photos we had taken. We also then colour corrected them so that the red was brighter and matched the reds used in our products. This was vital for synergy.

When creating our film's website in Year 12, we had a very basic layout that was provided by Wix. We did not change this layout much at all and did not include many things on there, only a little bit of text, and the film poster. This is due to the fact that we were not confident with what the website should include and how to create one in the first place using the Wix tool.

After practicing, we were able to develop a much more complex and creative website for our music artist in Year 13. This year, we were able to alter the website's layout drastically and add various different photos, videos and decorative boxes. We also imported our own fonts so that we could match the other products since synergy was so important to us. We spent much more time on the website this year and it was much more aesthetically pleasing and professional. We looked at Ed Sheeran's website for inspiration and found that he included a large photo of himself on the home page and so decided to include this in our own. We, therefore, had to use Wix to create this layout for our homepage. We also looked at the page tags that he has on his navigation bar and decided to change ours to make them match his. This required learning how to edit the navigation bar, something that we did not have to do in Year 12, and demonstrates a way that we have been more creative in website development.