Creativity in Media

Throughout the year 12 media studies course I used a range of digital technology, this included…

Hardware: video camera, tripod, SD card

Software: I movie, Final cut, Live type, PowerPoint, word

Online: YouTube, Issue, blogger, prezi, da font

Last year when creating a British social realism opening scene, I researched into the genre by watching the films that fitted under this category of being British social realist. Through the research stage when trying to find a suitable idea for our opening scene we created a vox pop. In this we asked a certain amount of people to answer questions about the genre we were looking at. By doing this we got feedback from what they felt was good about the genre, what was not as good and what they would be interesting in watching. I spent a lot of time on YouTube to discover the conventions of an opening sequence and thing that’s we typically see in the British social realist genre. For example we looked at a normal opening scene and saw how many credits that were displayed (e.g. names of actors, producers, and crew) and this helped me get a rough idea of how many I should put into my opening scene. The time I spent on planning I had to think about what camera shots, angles and movements I would use and how I would put them together in my opening scene. I had to keep to the typical conventions that I had previously seen in the films that I had watched at the beginning of the course.

Once we had gathered all our footage we went onto editing and putting in all the typical conventions you would see in an opening scene. With this footage I used I movie to edit all of the clips and put them into a correct order that fitted with what I was trying to show to the audience. I then went onto finding music which would be suitable for the theme and the genre; I used a copy right free music website where I found a good track which would work well. I then had to go back to edit in I movie to make changes to cuts so it fitted to the beat of the music. I created my graphics on live type and got the image for the title off of Flickr which I then imported onto final cut. This is where the final steps were taken and my final opening scene was tweaked and finally completed.

In year 12 looking at British social realism I found out a lot about the camera language which would be suitable for the genre we were looking at. Most of the films I watched had minimal shot types and didn’t really use a wide range of angles or shots, however their use of continuity editing made it have more verisimilitude and this made it believable for the audience. I translated this into my work by using simple shots and repeating similar angles/shot types throughout the opening scene. The themes that I regularly saw were mainly violence, sex, drug/alcohol abuse and crime, this was shown mainly through the narrative and how the characters would act. One of the films used the theme of prostitution so we decided as it is seen in BSR but not a lot we could still use it. The mise-en-scene that I saw mainly was rather run down which reflected on the characters lifestyle, and dark, dull lighting was used a lot throughout the films to create a negative atmosphere for the audience. We used this information and put it into our own piece of work by using a similar colour pallet and a location which looked urban and shabby. The sound used in most of the films were diagetic as they wanted to keep the feel of realism, we kept this the same by using diagetic sound in ours where it matched with the action.