Q1A Post Production

Describe the most important post-production decisions you made for your media productions and why these decisions were significant. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how your skills in post production developed over time.

There were many significant decisions which took place in the creation of both my AS and A2 productions. My AS production was a film opening for a sports drama called Cohen. The story was about an elderly man reflecting on his career as an international football player. My A2 production was a pop music video, we created star profiles and formed a band called Avenue to act in the video. Processes from editing the production to creating posters and magazine covers ere included in the significant decision making in these projects.

For Cohen the editing process consisted of using simple cuts and transitions. The hardest part of the edit was creating the titles, this was a significant part of the edit as all film openings have titles. We decided to use a bold white font to make it easier to read. The colour white offered the most contrast between the shots which were mostly green and the writing. The editing process in my A2 production was much more technical, there were far more cuts being used throughout the entire video to keep up with the upbeat tempo of the song. This contrasts with the film opening as the style was a lot slower and emotional and therefore required less cuts. The higher amount of cuts being used in the music video was an improvement on the film opening as more precise cuts needed to be used to match the beat of the song. If the cut was slightly out in the music video it would have looked clunky however in the film opening it would have been fine.

In the post-production stages of both of the productions we created, we made posters which would be used in the marketing campaign of the product. For the film opening Cohen, we simply took a screen shot from the finished film and added titles around it to create the poster. This was achieved using Paint on windows PC's. The process was very simply and gave a mediocre result. For the music video however, we created posters advertising a tour of the band which was much more advanced. The first big improvement was the software programme we used to create the poster, we used Adobe Photoshop which is used by many companies in the media industry. Due to the use of a better programme we were able to use more effects to create a more professional looking poster. One of these effects includes 'cloning' which we used to take the smoke from the music video and put it into the poster. This was significant as we wanted to create synergy between the poster and the music video. We also used an image from a photoshoot rather than a screen shot which allowed better quality to make the poster look more professional.

We found that it was difficult to create synergy between our film opening products. We found that there were no symbols or features which were shared by all the products. For our music video we improved on this by using a type writer text creator which we used for all of the text throughout all of the products. The title on the music video used this along with the Diji Pak, posters and magazine covers which we created in the post production stages of creating the music video. In was significant that we included this synergy throughout all of our products because we wanted to create a band image which could eventually be manipulated into a brand.

In conclusion, significant features such as editing footage, making posters and creating synergy were improved over the duration of this course. We found that we payed more attention to detail in creating the music video which lead to an all around better final product.