Describe and evaluate your skills development over the course of your production work from Foundation Portfolio to Advanced Production.
- Creativity
FINISH FOR PREP & POST ON ITS OWN PAGE
Move to the Foundation Production. State clearly what the brief was ( a thriller opening or a new music magazine) and what creative processes you used you used THROUGHOUT the whole process and move on to your music video, digipack and advert.
Prelim: a limited, prescribed task involving an establishing shot, two-person shot and shot / reverse shots: some room for creativity in that I learned to shoot, capture and edit in iMovie.
The real creativity came with the thriller opening brief: my challenge was to devise a narrative in a Guy Ritchie style, involving gangland punishment and revenge. The mise-en-scene (an urban estate), character casting (four masked thugs), props (weapons like hammers and crowbars) and vehicle (VW car) all required creative planning; creativity is nothing without organization and I learned the value of detailed storyboards, recce shots, call sheets, equipment lists and cast meetings. These were all part of my creative process because they turn visualization into reality. I suppose that I learned a lot about strategic planning at AS and made mistakes which didn't happen at A2: research, planning, management of equipment, timing, feedback are all creative steps that are nailed down in blogs, emails, good record keeping with sufficient time for practice.
At AS, the post-production stage helped me to develop my creativity because I learned how to do continuity editing. This meant laying down an audio track which my partner and I composed in Logic Pro: an electronic orchestral sound with synthesizers created a sense of urgency, tension and forward momentum which was the sound code for the gang's journey through a bleak London estate leading up to the revenge attack on the disloyal gang member. I had to be creative with film language: POV shots placed the viewer in the driver's seat, tracking shots traced the journey and built tension, a low angle shot of the thug raising the hammer to smash the victim created terror.
Other post-production creativity included the title sequence: I learned to use appropriate fonts in the right order to simulate a real film opening; I also created a film website and Twitter page in order to show that I understood the importance of visual creativity in attracting and addressing audiences.
Continuity editing was the most demanding part of creativity in this task. I included examples of the 180 degree rule (to show the direction of the travelling car), match on action, shot reverse shot (interaction between gang members in the car), eyeline match (looking into the rear view mirror), insert shots.
A2 demanded a different emphasis: for Foster The People's Helena Beat I laid down the track quite simply, this time in Adobe Premiere, which was more complex than iMovie. We did have to cut the track and stitch it back together again, in order to shorten it, but the main demands on creativity was in the way we interpreted the lyrics and came up with a novel, alternative treatment.
Using genre conventions (use of performance, rehearsal, narrative, star close-ups and lip-synching) did not prevent us being very inventive. In the video treatment for our indie band, we wanted to show the two opposing sides to our stars - the public and private faces. The 'video diary' style of treatment followed them through their everyday struggles, fallings out and failures All of this needed creative choices in lighting (darkened post-production through colour correction), camerawork (use of fish eye lens to convey introspection and distorted reality), editing (fast pace to show loss of control and anxiety). This treatment was intercut with a totally different approach: brightly stage performance reassuring the band's public, smooth editing with CUs on performers' faces, drums and guitarists and, most creative of all, the many examples of very polished, sparky and entertaining stop frame animation.
I would like to explain these in some detail as these cuttaway shots are amongst the most creative aspects of my achievement over two years. Imagine the chorus (Yea, yea, and it's OK), which is a very fast, cheerful beat, being accompanied visually with a series of neon-bright, child-like, joyful and upbeat games: Scabble and Boggle letters magically move and form into the chorus lines. At another point, a brightly coloured keyboard in CU plays the keys magically in time to the beat.
Another piece of creativity involved the conception underlying the opening shot and the technical expertise necessary to carry it out: imagine a low angle CU of a hand lowering the arm of a retro style deck onto a vinyl record which slowly turns from black to purple and green. I used Adobe After Effects to achieve this.
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