Reflecting on my work so far

           When reflecting on my A2 work so far, it made me realise how much work I have left to do and how much work I have done. I am satisfied with the work I have done so far in the sense that our remake of the Busted music video for ‘That’s What I Go to School For’ turned out a lot better than I had anticipated. The whole class worked so well together as a whole and we managed to get all of the clips that we needed plus a few more to give us all more choice of clips when editing our own versions. I believe that the most challenging part was the lip syncing which is a vital skill to obtain for our up and coming project on music videos. I found that I need to have a lot of patience and spend as much time as possible on getting the lip syncing right on my video to make it as authentic as I can get it. I also learned from the Queen lip sync, that I did with my group at the time, that the way we film our lip sync is as important as the editing of it. We couldn’t get the lip sync perfect at that point because we were mouthing the lyrics a fraction faster than the actual song and so this had a knock-on effect during the editing process.

The DVD cover that I did for my Queen lip sync I was very pleased with. I did a lot of research into the conventions of other Queen DVD covers and so used those conventions in my own. I need to carry on this knowledge of understanding that the more I research into the conventions of that particular band and genre, the better my own work will turn out. This I will pass on to the makings of my Red Hot Chili Peppers video.

When I look at my digipak analysis, I think that I could have taken my research into more detail and depth because this would have boosted my knowledge of the Alternative Rock genre even more. Although I didn’t look as quite as many digipaks as I may have liked to, I still found out some really useful details such as the lack of colour, the name of the album and artists being at the top of the covers and the use of one central image to draw the audience’s attention. I have looked at many of the Red Hot Chili Peppers music videos that they have made from songs such as ‘Californication’ and ‘By The Way’ and so this will help me when thinking of the best music video for the song we have chosen, ‘Can’t Stop’. However, I need to write this down and upload it onto my blog in order to show my ideas and where these originated from. It is also important for me to look at videos from various other artists from the Alternative Rock genre. This will help me with ideas for my own music video of that genre.  

I still need to think more about exactly what shots I we want to put into our music video as a group and work out exactly where in the song we want to put them. After doing my short thriller film in AS last year, I realised that I need to be so much more organised this year. I can do this by managing my time a lot better and making plans for each filming session. I’ll make a to-do list of objectives that we need to achieve by the time our filming session is over. I have already made sure that I have the mobile numbers of all of the members of my group in order to keep close contact with them if any issues arise and we are not together. Creativity is a big issue that needs to be thought about when making this music video. I feel that we weren’t very creative with our choice of location in the sense that we just stuck to Tasha’s house for the whole film when we should have used other locations as well as that one.

To prepare myself for the A2 exam, I’m going to analyse my filming and editing as I go along. I think this will help me as it saves me from having to go through all of my work and analyse it when it comes to the exam when all I will have to do is revise my notes I have made. I will also make sure that I have extended my vocabulary of technical words in order to gain the most marks as I possibly can in that area. I will also compare my work I am doing at A2 to that of which I have done at AS so that I have combined what I have learned from last year with my thoughts on how I have used my new skills in my A2 work.