Post Production Essay

Describe a range of creative decisions that you made in the post production stage and how these decisions made a difference to the final outcomes. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills have developed over time.

The process of post production over the two years has improved dramatically. In the first year of the coursework (Year 12), the post production was minimal in the productions of the first practice edit (dancing bears), the Preliminary task, the second practice edit (Juno) and the final film opening (Untamed).
The Prelim task in year 12 had very limited post production. Firstly, we did not research into the genre beforehand in enough depth. After filming, the editing was extremely limited, as we did not have enough knowledge of how to do so. The editing included very basic transitions and text imputed onto the moving image. We did not use any sound in the post production stage of the prelim, meaning the sound was very low quality from filming outdoors. Therefore from this experience, we learned that sound was crucial in a film production in order for it to have a professional look and feel.

However, the film opening (Untamed) was at a heightened standard from the prelim. We did use more editing techniques on Adobe Premiere Pro in order to attain the outcome we were striving for. We used colour correcting on he whole video to make each scene match each other in brightness, saturation and underling colour, we used foley by doing voice over for parts of sound and dialogue which was illegible - we learned this from the prelim stage. Also the use of adding songs on top of the footage and sound which fitted the genre and mood of those scenes. There was a use of titles over the footage which we had researched into using art of the title, making us more confident and experienced in this area. We then used some effects such as transitions and changing of the speed - however, these effects were minimal and were a draw back to our final product.

In year 13, we developed our skills even further through the Preliminary task, practice edit, and the final music video. In the post production of the prelim stage, we used man more effects such as colour correcter, warp stabiliser and the use of motion (zoom in and out of footage), and also titles. We ended up using all three of these effects in the final video. We did not use warp stabiliser or motion in year 12 as we were not experienced in these effects, yet this prelim allowed us to become more confident and knowledgeable in editing and post production. The fluidity of the editing had also improved since year 12 as we edited the cuts and shots to the beat of the music in the prelim, whereas we had struggled with this in year 12, making the final film opening seem slow and rigid.
We did neglect a considerable amount of footage in the editing stage. We filmed a whole other scene which we did not use in the final product. In the post production stage we really went through every shot very finely and precisely in order to get the best footage for the final video.

We did create a website in year 12 for the film opening yet it was very basic compared to our final website in year 13. The year 13 website had 7 pages to explore, and a lot of interactional links, such as the video, digipak, and moving images from the photoshoot. Yet in the year 12 website, it was considerably more limited as we had very few tabs and no interactivity apart from the link to the video.

In year 13, we used photoshop in order to create the digipak, tour poster, magazine cover, and merchandise. This was a dramatic improvement from our creation of images as last year we did not even use photoshop, we used microsoft powerpoint and word. The use of photoshop allowed us to use a multitude of new tools - which we learned through online forums and youtube tutorials.