Post-production

How important has the post-production stage been in your foundation and advanced portfolios and how have your skills developed over these two years?

Post-production is a key skill to develop across all types of media , The knowledge of technology certainly helps to develop your skills further and you gain further ideas of what is possible to create. ‘What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. (Steve Jobbs). In this essay I will discuss my development using these ideas and how post-production is key to develop and experience across all types of media.
In my thriller opening I used a slow motion shot to add effect and dramatisation to the characters action and make it key to the film. I did this using the options available on I movie and slowed the speed down to what I thought was suitable. I also used colourisation which helped to connotate the flashbacks with black and white as the flashback and colour as the norm . Flashbacks are a key feature to thriller films and by using imovie I was able to find the different colour schemes you could pick or the colour wheel where you could edit the colour of the shot manually.
In my thriller opening we used music to back up the film but the cutting to the beat was a lot more basic than that of our music video. When it came to matching music with visuals and getting the film to act out the music, we found that we had gained a better ear for where the music should be cut on the beat. A key feature to Music videos is keeping the audience interested with lots more fast cuts and transitions. We had to sync the movement of the mouth to the write lyrics in the song and the playing of the guitar to the sound of the instrument playing in the music which required much more precision in editing and practice than that of our thriller opening.
We also used slow motion in our music video, but with learning more a bout the advantages of I movie we were able to use the speed control to speed up shots aswell , we used the slow motion to focus on the action of the character but also to go with the change of the beat in the music when the verse comes in. We used to speed to fasten a shot we had already used in the music video which was the dangling smiley face and fastened it to make it look happier as that part of our music video had come around.
In my music video we had developed our skills on ways that we could use basic processes from the I movie to create many different effects with the filming such as the jump cut we used when the main girl is walking and we cut it as she walks towards the camera to make her look like she has jumped from place to place going to the beat of the music. To do this we just cut out parts of the footage and split the clip to the right timing. Another way was using stop motion where we just took a very basic shot, stopped filming, took it again with something else different and then stopped like a flip book with filming which creates a moving effect with effectively still images.
Basic transitions we used in the thriller opening were fade in, fade to black which made the cut seem less jumpy and was used quite effectively at the end when the titles came up, but in the music video we had a lot knowledge o f the different transitions and were able to plan more carefully which ones we would used. We used a cube effect to distinguish between two very similar scenes which was effective as it made the shot look as if it was moving. We also tried using two doors opening to go with the band theme, but this didn’t work as well and cut up the scene in the wrong places.