The meeting video

The meeting

When we started our media lesson, we were told that we were going to make a short film as practice for our year 13 coursework. The film had to be no longer than 60 seconds, be shot inside the school grounds, cover different aspects of filming which were to have the ability to hold a steady shot using a tripod and to use different shots from what we learnt during AS Media. The main theme of the short film would be based around the title 'The Meeting'

Firstly, it was required of us to plan out what we were going to do, so we came up with a story line based around the theme ‘meeting’. A new girl arrives in school but she gets bullied by Hannah who in the end gets knocked out.

Secondly, from our story line we drew out a storyboard version of our short film, where we planned out the different types of shots we would be using and how we wanted it to be shown while making the film.

Once we had finished with the practical stuff, we uploaded the film onto a programme called iMovie. This software enabled us to edit the film and to use different editing techniques such as cuts or dissolve.

Since this was our very first try of making a film, we knew that we would not be able to break into the A/B grade boundaries. However, from the feedback that was given I learnt that when making my trailer it is important that we:

• Use a tripod to keep steady shots throughout the trailer,
• keep the camera on one person throughout the whole time and then on the other, to be able to create cuts when editing on iMovie
• keep shots no longer than 5 seconds to avoid the audience becoming bored and
• use dissolve techniques only when we want to show how time passed,

These points will be kept to mind while making the final trailer for my coursework.

Starting year 13 coursework

On the 29th June, we were lucky to have a media specialist come in and talk to us about how to improve our coursework for year 13. As a starter activity, we looked back on our AS course and had to talk about what we like and disliked about the course. By reflecting, this allows us to make future improvements in order to achieve a better grade. We made our own island and drew different symbols to describe the positive and negative aspects of our course last year. As you can see from the image, the most favorable moments in AS were working with technologies, editing, learning about music such as labels etc. However, the negative pontes had to be doing the research and planning and working with macs.