Practical Skills Evaluation

 The Final

Practical and Professional skills I've covered but it's time to see how well I covered them.

Looking at camera and lighting I feel that I have covered everything necessary here, I have gone into good detail about the various areas such as what lighting is best for the right situations when filming providing decent advice into what lighting products work best for the right circumstances. When discussing DSLR basics and ISO usage I feel that I covered the right details and gave good advice based off of it, while providing examples of what I talk about to demonstrate points and show what happens when talking about the various settings and other accessories when doing so.

However I do feel that I had some weakness to in the work that I did for this area, for example when discussing standard lighting for photography studios, I only covered the basics of what the area had and only really covered the basic idea behind each lighting type rather than discussing not only that but real world application of these techniques.

In future I need to remember that while analysing and providing examples of what each technique can do is good showing and giving real life applications and effectiveness is also necessary as that's where they'll be used more than how they have been used in the past.

The next area to cover is legal and health. I covered this exceptionally well as I gave some strong real world examples and scenarios as well as relating them to the current project.

In relation to health I covered all applicable situations that could arise from doing certain pieces of work or projects, it covers damages to camera operators, actors and others around the area while the project is underway and how best to cover them from these incidents should they occur. However it's not just damages to people directly but indirectly like having something wet around electrical sockets etc.

When covering the idea of legal I feel like this was my biggest strength. I covered all possible legal conflicts or ideas when making a production from copyright to fair usage and actor regulation. I made sure that every aspect showed what each part does and more importantly how these aspects would impact the production and how I would help move it along from there.

The next time I do a project like this the improvements would be based on the lesser amount of detail that I gave to the health aspect of productions as while the multiple posts gave them good coverage I feel that there was still aspects I could have given more details to or maybe instead of giving a great focus to the real world part of the development I could instead have provided more considerations that might not be known to most but still give importance to the production as a whole.

Lastly would be planning and how effective I was at doing so. In the first project I covered planning to a heavy degree, talking about shot lists and equipment as well as budgeting and other such necessities for a large scale production.

For the promotional video I feel that this was my strongest area as I gave great detail to every important area within it and showed how each of these details impacted my decision. I feel that my strongest piece in this was discussing the budgeting as I provided greater detail from this and demonstrated how these details would impact the choices I make for my project.

The music video was weaker I didn't give as much detailed analysis of the same areas as before and what I did cover was flimsy and didn't capture what I discussed to the same effect as in previous projects. I only gave small pieces of what each was alongside what I was using them for.

For future projects and other such ideas I need to dedicate the same amount of time to the each area in order to make sure that they're all as effective as each other to give me the best result for my project which helps me to ensure that I'm getting a quality product by the end. 

Editing Review

 Review overall

With the end of the units I feel that it's important to cover everything that I have done that involves editing, from things I've made to assessing other works.

Starting with how I have assessed other works, when I looked at Jaws I assessed how the edits were put together in order to give greater meaning for the scenes. I felt that I covered this area well, I covered all the camera shots alongside how they were edited in place in order to seem sequential or how those edits created meaning. An example of this is found when I covered the edits between the characters talking and how the edit of jumpcutting to the protagonist showed the isolation compared to his peers.

Now this is not to say that I couldn't improve, for example I could have gone into more detail about why there was such little editing within that scene and how that helped to boost the impact of the scene as there was a primay focus on the two around the table or how the simple cuts were used more than others that were too.

Easy Rider was a less than strong argument about how editing was used. For a start there was little to no assessing of the actual edits themselves but more of a recap in what was used, I also only referenced them in a proper light when refereeing to them in the context of other pieces of the scene meaning that there was no cohesion in how I looked at the topic.

For next time when I look at this idea, I should have more dedicated to the editing techniques, what they are, how effectively they're used but most importantly the impact they have on the scene and the audience overall as this will give me not only better detail when assessing these edits but gives me more of an idea of how that could impact the scene later on.

When I discussed the rules of cinematography in talking about shots, I mentioned how these were edited together (should they need it) in order to create a strong scene. As this mention was only breif however I feel that I gave the detail necessary to be understood about how it relates to the largeer set as a whole.

I could have given more detail about why these shots needed to be edited together for the scenes to achieve their effect, for example in the shot reverse shot, which would have made my point on why its important to the set-up stronger but I feel that I achieved what I needed to for this are despite this.

For the music videos I'll give a brief summary of each below:

In the Katy Perry video I covered the impact some of the chosen edits had on the video as a whole and more importantly how that gave an extra layer of meaning and depth to the song overall. I feel that my coverage explained how impactful these edits were to a basic level and gave a brief explanation as to why it had this impact.

I could have given some better inclusion to these edits and talked about them in more detail such as explaining an idea of why certain ones are used the way they are. I also didn't cover them in the right way, it was in the context of talking about the narrative of the video itself rather than dedicating its own section to make my points clear and just giving the context of the shot.

For the Tenacious D video I briefly go over what's needed but it's in no way detailed and barely covers what happens in the video for the edits to be effective enough to cover the true effect of the edits within the video itself and therefore any detailed analysis or results that I could have gained from it which would impact my own work.

In future I should remember to give explicit details about the editing as a whole and relate it back to my own work to assess the impact it could have on my own production.

Onto my own productions:

The first is my new wave film. Within this I feel that I managed to achieve some goals, for example I gained meaning from edits by having them demonstrate certain effects and impacts that I wanted my production to have, for example using a disorientating transition in order to demonstrate a passage of time but also to show the characters dizziness and confusion in a literal sense but using this method also gave the audience the same feeling of confusion. The sequence in which its edited together does show a clear story narrative in a focused order and everything was put into the place for it and worked well with each piece within it.

Improvements I could have made are to maybe make it a bit more clear about the story arc or given it a bit more of a clear focus to the actual thing itself. The transitions could've been a lot smoother too between scenes and making sure that each one had a clear purpose for being used.

For next time I think stronger plannign would give me a better result and clearer focus and structure to what I had to make, but it would also give me something to proof my final product against to see how it compares to what I had envisioned over a guide of what I want done.

The last is the music video. This was my worst, the edits emphasized the idea I wanted but were sloppy in use and placement, contrary to typical music videos the edits that I used here did nothing to amplify the lyrics of the song or the visuals themselves of the video. The use of them was bad too, it seemed to be just for the use of that changing from one scene to the next.

In  future I need a better dedicated structure for what I want to get out of the video and how well what I've chosen to do goes with the lyrics of the song which gives strong amplification of the song used in order to hghlight more meaning to it.