Skills Evaluation of AS Production

Technical
I found the blogging side of the project to be rather simplistic and easy to achieve, however I was not always up to date with everything and had to do a lot of catching up, so next time I need to keep up to date more, and I could also post things other than mere paragraphs of what we did, I could blog pictures for example to show what we looked at or did.

Camera Skills
The shots we used for our project last time were relatively decent but to improve we could most certainly go for A-Grade shots, for example we could think about what angle we take a shot from in order to create more impact upon the viewer, there was also a lot of empty space in our shots and not a lot of mouth-on action, so we should most certainly fill up the spaces in our shots and use more mouth-on action.

Editing
We did experiment about with editing on the program we used and thought about the captions design, I honestly did not like the song we used which was 'The A-Team' by Ed Sheeran, it was too upbeat and catchy so we had to create a more moody and downbeat version, we only used a piano for this so we could have added maybe another instrument to create more atmosphere, but it worked well enough on it's own. We could also experiment more with video edits, but we used some effective transitions.

Creativity
During the editing process it soon became clear that we had done a lot of ordinary and uninteresting shots and had not really thought out any creative ideas that we could have used. We did have some however, for example Shaunagh's change of clothes when she walks through the woodland and the scream at the beginning of the opening. We could have taken shots at more interesting angles or thought about the lighting more, for example when we see the grieving mother we could have used some dramatic lighting and gone for a close up rather than a medium shot.

Characters
The characters we used in the opening were based upon stereotypes often related to poorer and more crime-filled areas of Britain, for example my character was a stereotype of a Chav, an anti-social and hooliganistic adolescent that wears sports designer clothing such as Adidas, Nike etc and behaves in a disorderly manner, and Shaunagh's character was a stereotype of a prostitute, a female who engages in sexual activity for money. We designed the characters around these stereotypes, thinking about dress code and the way they would behave in the opening. They both represent stereotypical British adolescents and young adults, and are realistic in this sense because. We made Shaunagh's character with the aim of getting audiences to sympathise with her because despite her activities as a prostitute, she still is a young girl whose life has not gone well for her.