The skills I have developed during my AS year...

Reflecting back on my AS year

In my AS year, this was the first time of ever doing a media course and so I thought I might even struggle when it came to learning how to use some of the technologies that were new to me. But to my surprise I learnt a lot quite quickly! I can honestly say I have learnt a lot of technical skills and I have listed them below.

-          Using the camera ; I learnt the basic skills of how to use the camera such as switching it on, inserting the battery and the memory card, how to record, how to zoom in, adjust the sharpness and the lightning, how to play back what we recorded and so on. I also learnt how to use the lighting tool as we needed it at times when our location became too dark.

-  Final Cut Pro; This is the programme we used to import our film clips into, and to edit them into a film. I also learned how to edit the appearance of the clips, for example some clips were really dark so we adjusted the brightness using Final Cut Pro. We also used transitions such as dissolves, fades, fade on and fade out to add effect to our film. I also used this programme to create our sound and titles for our film.

-          Using Live Type; I learnt how to use Live Type as we used this programme to create the titles for one of our prelim films. It allowed us to create different, unique and more complex effects than Final Cut Pro. I was able to use more stylish effects and using transitions such as making the titles dance on the screen, or flash etc.

-          Sound Track Pro; I learnt how to use Sound Track Pro as we used this to create the sound (music) for our film. I was able to search for different sounds and sound effects, choose the ones we finally wanted and combine them together to make a complete sound track, I then imported it into Final Cut Pro to edit it into our film.

-          Using Handbrake; This programme allowed us to convert our finished film into an mp4 so that we were able to post it on blogger. It was fairly straight forward but we always had to remember to convert it otherwise it would not play when we uploaded it onto blogger and other sites!

-          Quick Time Recorder; This is a programme which is built into the Apple Macs which recorded our screen as we were in the process of editing. We could then save it and upload it onto blogger so that we would have a small clip showing how we edited our film on screen.

-           Using the Video Drive; I learnt how to save all our work onto the video drive. We did a lot of filming so it was useful as it had very large memory space!