Thursday, 8 October 2009

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

Short Film- Preliminary Excercise

The first task we did when starting media in september was to create a short film in groups of three, the film had to include 12 to 15 shots and a few pieces of dialogue. We strted by creating a storyboard so taht we knew what we were going to do. It was the first time taht any of us had used a camera for filming so before we started we had a quick playa round with the camera to get used to how it works and how we would go about creating the correct shots, i found that a panning shot was the hardest to achieve because you had to have a very steady hand and move at a constant speed. After filming we plugged the camera into a Mac PC to begin editing, we had alot of difficulties with this as we had erased some key shots because of rewinding the tape and watching some clips, although this did take alot away from our work i am glad we found this earlier on so that we can learn from our mistakes and progress furthur next time we are doing any sort of filming. I will post the video onto my blog as soon as it has been converted into the correct format by the ICT department.

Magazine Cover- Preliminary

As a preliminary task I was to design an A4 page to be used as the cover on a school magazine. The magazine cover had to include a mid-shot, masthead and three or four pieces of suitable text. I worked with one other person and we started off by by choosing the person that we wanted to feature in the mid-shot that would used in the centre of our cover, we chose fellow classmate Hannah Scoular because of her quirky style that would make the magazine seem fresh and young and really help connect with the target audience. Hannah wore brightly coloured clothing when we photographed her, this eventually helped to make the cover eye-catching, this is very important when selling magazines. We decided that the title of the magazine would we 'Survive' and that the magazine would be a guide to students on how to reduce stress and achieve to the best of there potential when in sixth form education. We started off by taking eight photos of Hannah sitting on the floor looking towards the camera, the use of a high angle made her seem slightly vulnerable and inferior which are emotions that readers struggling with the stress of sixth form will be able to relate to. We were very pleased with the photos and after uploading them onto the computer we opened it with Photoshop we then began to cut out the picture to remove the background and apply our own themed coloured to better complement the masthead. Hannah's dark coloured hair merged with a shadow in the background and therefore made the picture very hard to cut out, to solve this problem I zoomed in to be far more precise. After cutting out the picture we added a light purple background so that the magazine will appeal to both boys and girls
The title of our magazine is 'Survival- How to survive sixth form', we used lower case lettering and a rounded font to make the magazine appear informal and inviting to potential buyers.