Describe how you developed your post production skills for media production and evaluate how these skills informed your creative media practise. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

In AS we had to create an opening sequence two minutes long including titles, for A2 we had to create a promo package including music video and digipak. In AS we used blogger.com which is a web 2.0, during post production to show off the work that we have done for our target audience and to receive comments back to improve our opening sequence. The blog was only basic and didn’t really have a wide variation of options to change themes. In A2 I updated my blog and now I have lots more choices to change themes, writing styles, layout and many other things. I have found that I have more blog posts than last year because I understand the software a lot more and know my way round it.

I found that imovie in AS was very difficult to understand and to work my way round it, also live type I tried to work with it was limited to certain effects you could do to the text. You could change the change the size and font of your text but this was also limited to certain fonts. In A2 I used a better type of editor on the computer that was final cut it is non linear, has a wide range of effects to choose from, it also has markers that go on the timeline to help you place the next clip into your work. The negative points on final cut is that the rendering takes a while to do I learnt to over come this by rendering in smaller groups and this meant it would be a lot faster. Another negative point was you couldn’t see the effect before using them so you had to guess which one you think is the right one you wanted. This helped with creativity because I had different effects in my work for and example I had black and white effect and I change the speeds of some shots in the music video.

Photoshop in AS was very interesting because we were just starting to learn the basics of the software. I only knew a few tools, what their names were and what they did. This shown in my work when I created a logo, it was basic shapes that I took off the web. A2 the software was updated to cs5.1 and I started doing some tutorials in other lessons and started to build my knowledge of the tools and effects I could do with the filters, cures and levels. I think that my creativity improved a lot because I could create more complex images using the new tools I learnt. I think the technique that helped me to improve my creativity was the masking technique this meant I could cut out an image making it look smart and professional. The negative points of photoshop I think is that if you don’t know how to use certain tools or even how to use the software all together it is very difficult to learn and understand the processes you have to take to create an effect.

Slideshare.net (web 2.0) I think that this website is very helpful because it allows people to upload work and creates a document that can put on a blog or website. In AS I didn’t really use the site very much because I did most of my work on paper then typed it up straight into a post. But when I did use slideshare.net it had a size limit, which was quite small for a word document or power point. In A2 I used slideshare.net a lot because I was producing a lot of work and found it easier putting my work straight into a word document and share onto the internet (my blog). Slideshare.net has improved the upload size so it meant that the amount of work has improve.