Progress

Before Easter Half Term:

Ancilliary Tasks 100%
Filming/Construction 75%

Me, Ryan and Sarah plan to mainly focus on filming over the 2 weeks Easter holiday so when we return afterwards our main construction will be completed and will be able to be shown infront of an audience to receive critical feedback which will help with our evaluation section of this course.

Important Narrative Conventions

The main convetion are;

Genre

Character

Form

Time

Character Choices

Jamie (Sarah Watson) is reflecting on her childhood to her therapist. She talks about the times her grandfather would tell her stories about how he was a medic in the war, and the story of how he was attending to a man who was bleeding to death, but had to leave him and deal with a group of men dying on the field – so the man bled to death. Before she was institutionalised, she researched and discovered that the man’s body was never found. These are what led to the night terrors that made her hallucinate and drove her insane.

Now she still has to be tied to the bed because these dreams of the man coming back for her are causing her to have violent fits in her sleep. She eventually begins to believe that the man (Ryan Willis) is coming back for her because she is finding it difficult to differentiate between her dreams and reality.

iMovie

To edit our project, we are using iMovie. The reasons for this choice are

You can:

• Edit video footage.
• Create your own footage to edit.
• Create an interactive and fun learning environment.
• Create individuality among an assignment using all the effects that iMovie holds.

Narrative Theory

Equilibrium’ Theory

This theory says that all stories are about the fight to return to normality.An event happens, and everything after the event is about the attempt to return to normal – or ‘equilibrium.’

Levi Strauss, An anthopologist.

He studies how ‘primitive’ societies functioned. He argued that primitive societies and so-called ‘advanced’ societies shared similar elements.

Subject Deadlines

Deadlines

Ancillary tasks to be completed for the end of half term.

Not allowing us to get less than 8 out of 10 marks. Show teachers on a regular basis.   15^th February

Filming and editing every Tuesday morning for the rest of term.

WEEK ONE THURSDAY PERIOD 4 - British films
WEEK TWO THURSDAY PERIOD 4 – Skills and Concepts
WEEK TWO TUESDAY PERIOD 1 - British films

All of your rushes (raw footage) completed and filmed by the end of the term.

Should be regularly putting on a relatively short blog entry about ancillary tasks!

Production sheets every Monday.  Production Schedule week beginning…

Narrative Theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss

Every Tuesday 2^nd Period (Week 2) Skills and Concepts

Blog entry about class constructive criticism on ancillary task. Upload image and say what you’re going to improve on.

Continued

Another main feature used during my course was Blogger - a free website which allows people to post blog posts and images. This is a key part of our course as all students have to use this website and post their work electronically so the moderators can view them. Blogger was a helpful website in the creation of my magazine as it allowed us to view each other’s blogs for inspiration and also to view the school blog which is managed by the teachers. On the departmental blog, information about the course, our homework, different power points showing information and links to different peoples blogs are all easily accessible which creates a simpler method to retrieve information – also adding past students blogs allows us to see what marks they got for the standard of work so we knew what to work towards.

This can be accredited by the theorist David Gauntlet who brought the introduction to interactive media (such as online blogs) so that it would help media users and most importantly media students become more creative – “recognition that internet and digital media have fundamentally changed the ways in which we engage with all media”. This helped my creative decision making as I was able to use more imaginative decisions based on the feedback I received from my subject teachers and other students in the class. I received critical feedback on my contents page and front cover, as people thought it lacked the conventional features of current music magazines. 

On the whole, this production allowed me carry out creative decisions and to create a piece of work which was on the whole a well-produced piece of work. I also came to the decision that the best publication software is Photoshop – which has a wide range of professional features, which Microsoft Publisher lacks and has a much easier user-interface which has easy to use features.       

Digital Technology Skills

I am going to discuss how my digital technology skills contributed to the process of creative decision making whilst creating my AS Level magazine cover. Firstly, in my AS level media course, I created a music magazine. This required me to research and annotates different genres of music magazine and talk about the features and advantages which they had over other magazines. After this part, I chose ‘Rolling Stones’ magazine as my style model and came to the decision that I was going to base my design on this magazine.

Throughout the whole process of designing and making my music magazine covers and article, I used my skills of Photoshop to create a professional and quality looking piece of work. I knew that my skills of Photoshop were somewhat lacking – but I persevered and after the course, I have learnt many skills which will help me in the ancillary tasks I need to carry out in my A Level course. In my spare time, I asked my friend who is a skilled Photoshop user, to teach me some different features and design skills which would benefit me whilst creating the magazine. From my production. I have acquired many different creative skills which I can use in future on Photoshop. Prior to my production, I have only used Photoshop a few times, so when it came to the creative production of the music magazine, I had to get really involved and learn new features.