Extra writing on my creativity skills

My development on the Media studies course I began by doing an AS Preliminary task that involved a short conversation using shot-reverse shot and the principles of the 180-degree rule. I then led, amongst a group of four, the main task that was to create an opening sequence to a thriller film that was a maximum of two minutes in length. I came up with the creative and original name “Wheelchair Bound” for our creation. Following this, into A2 the task was to create a music promotion that involved two ancillary texts; a digipak and a website for my chosen artist that backed up my main task a music video, it centred the artist “Plan B” and song name “She Said”.

In general I started with a fairly creative mind this helped me have a good basis to develop in Media. Throughout my A level course however I have become more creative in the way that I have begun to think more outside the box.

A clear example of my development in terms of creativity centres the two main productions created for my foundation and advanced portfolios. In the AS task my creativity was limited, when I picked our characters for our production I stayed within the small, secure, simple route by making myself the main character (antagonist) and group members other characters in the Wheelchair Bound film I created. This is not very creative but it worked well for our first time creating a thriller opening sequence. However my creativity expanded in A2, working by myself I was allowed creative freedom and I found advantageous, using the research I found in R&B, Soul and Hip-Pop genres I made creative decisions to reflect my intentions, the characters for instance were my choice and came from outside my Media studies class and I also made the creative decision to have black characters in the narrative, I done this because not only was the artist also black, but creative wise it fitted some of the main conventions of real media texts I researched previously. Although I chose again to put myself in the spotlight again, this time creativity was solely down to me, I was able to choose costume designs, locations for the as-live and narrative and choose the shots and angles I thought would work best.

My creativity again broadened between AS and A2 in terms of my technological prowess, during my AS year the powerful internet based software ‘Blogger.com’ it functioned as my hub for all my creativity, here I put up my work, research, ideas and evaluations for my teacher to see without difficulty, but this looking back was limited, it was basic, it did the essential things, but it wasn’t innovative enough, I was not able to present information in enough inventive fashions. But in my A2 year my software creativity spanned different forms, for example my evaluations were not made all in one form a short video simply edited and slapped onto blogger, in my A2 evaluations I tried to spread my creativity, using other tools and software’s such as ‘Prezi.com’ which was more powerful internet based presentation making website. Also built on the success of my video presentations for the AS evaluations and used it for one of my A2 questions this was creative as it was outside the box, it wasn’t as narrow and simplistic as a basic essay it was moving and visually creative.

In the making of my AS production our shot types and angles wasn’t very creative, we made sure we had some of the straightforward essential shots and then worried about creativity afterwards, this was a method that didn’t work well as we had to go back and film on numerous occasions due to a lack of creativity and content, even though my ground idea was a good basis to be creative. This is mainly evident in the use of the main concept of disability I thought of initially. This prop was largely unseen in films and we wanted to think outside conventional spectrum and create something no one had seen before and wanted to see after watching our opening sequence.

My creativity I believe shone through in my A2 production my choice of shots was far more advanced and effective for creating the storyline intended in my work. Match on action shots seen in both I would argue was more effective in my A2 task, I used other shots alongside this such as shot reverse shots (first learnt in my preliminary exercise), close ups, handheld and point of views to build up the storyline far more creatively for my audience. Props were also used in my A2 task but I took the creative decision to make it less prevalent throughout my production but allowing it to be understood by the viewer slowly by building up keep subliminal messages. In my opinion this was a more advanced technique and took more effort in the post-production editing process to show it.

My Media studies development I believe has room for unlimited growth and I aim to take forward everything I have learnt into further media production projects, such as the one I took part in October 2011 where I helped my local area film a sporting event for young children, experiences from the media course has allowed me to produce advanced, creative work that are seen on wider scale.