Aliens and political metaphors

Aliens and political metaphors

Alien representation

Media Aliens

Section A essay

Discuss how your skills and the use of digital technology have developed and helped in your research and planning for your productions. 

From my foundation to advanced portfolio my basic technology skills improved overall. I built upon my knowledge of softwares such as Photoshop and hardware like HD cameras. 

Using on line tools such as Youtube and Vevo was a very useful method of research in both AS and A2. These websites allowed me to look at a range of vampire genre openings for my AS production and used other tools such as blogger to type and post a list of the conventions e.g. titling and mise en scene. However in A2 the websites 'Scribd' allowed me to be more comfortable when evaluating and analysing music videos by Ed Sheeran or Nina Nesbitt. Scribd made it easy to transfer Word and Powerpoint documents ont my blogger page. It was also convenient when planning my 2 productions. Creating storyboards and scripts became easier to do and share on line using Scribd. 

Again, Youtube and Vevo helped to look at many music videos from all genres and artists which I referenced by embedding on the blog. 

In A2, I found it more effective to create an 'animatic' for a music video rather than a storyboard as part of the planning. This was because the music can easily be edited on top of the images so that images and lyrics would correspond. I used the same HD Samsung camera for both portfolios, but during A2 filming I felt more confident working with manual focus to come up with the effect I wanted. As part of planning and practice we did test shoots to experience with the different features of the camera. 

All the footage was uploaded on to the Apple Macs. To edit my vampire horror opening, I used iMovie which is a simple editing software available on Apple devices used to edit film. As the software has a basic format, it was difficult to achieve some of the more complex things I wanted to. However when editing the music video, I used Final Cut Pro X which allows a wide range of techniques such as blading, scaling or trimming  to edit at a more professional level .

Our advanced portfolio included ancillary products; A poster and a Digi-Pak also needed to be created using the real conventions of each. I conducted research into these by looking at existing posters and CD cases via Google. I analysed a range of them to find similarities and differences between each. Although in AS, I had researched into movie posters so I was familiar with what I needed to note down and apply to the Album release poster.