Post Production.

After watching many children's film openings we found a lot of them had used the idea of moving toys or man made models like Wallace and Gromit. So when it came to the children's opening we decided to use the one stop motion method which worked extremely well and applied to out target audience.
When studying thrillers and the main key features that make a good thriller we went for the stereotypical "member of the public stumbles across a dead body" idea which was very common in a lot of thrillers. We wanted that "eerie creepy" feeling so we made it look like the killer was watching the main characters and moving towards them in a running motion. This idea worked well because its rare in films to find the killer so close so this created a lot of tension.
Whilst reviewing hip-hop and rap music video's we noticed the same thing popping up in almost all of them: We wanted a music video that was unique and would stand out so after a lot of thinking, practicing and learning we decided to rotoscope the whole music video which took a long time but yes it worked and of course it stands out, we are the only group to rotoscope a music video in whole of Longroad. We tried to use as many of the following as possible but we needed to stick to the stereotypical hip-hop/rap genre.

Without the post-production it wouldn't give us the time to add any additional editing, special effects, music, transitions ect.. It would make things a lot less interesting and unique and would restrict us to show off our skills and allow us to express our idea's.

Looking back at what we first started with, I would say our skills have developed a lot. It seems that we chose the hardest root when it came to the children's opening but it did pay off. We decided to use one stop motion and clay models as our idea and when working with one stop motion we had to edit as we went a long instead of leaving it all to the last minute, that was hard to do and seeing our lessons were only an hour and half long each we had to work fast and keep the consistency of the models. Moving onto the thriller we didn't really try anything out of the ordinary, we just used strong camera angles and the use of overlapping music. As for the music video we went a little out of our comfort zone to make an impact, we wanted to achieve a fully rotoscoped music video purely because we knew it hadn't been done before. We succeeded, we used many sequences of skateboarding, dancing, cars, singing and we found out how to use slow motion effects and reversing clips which worked wonders. When it came to the rotoscoping and editing it was literally left right till the last lesson and we had only a few hours to import the rotoscoped clips into final cut which took a very long time, we then had to apply to music video over the top and then for the last few moments we had left we used that time to do some last minute editing and alterations to give it an extra kick.

To what extent have digital technologies helped develop your research and planning skills during your two year media A-Level course?

P2 - Q1(a): Skills Development - 2010/11