Post-production essay

“The post-production process can be the most important part of the filming process”. How important has the post-production stage been in your foundation and advanced portfolios and how have your skills developed over these two years?

For my foundation portfolio I created a music magazine whereas for my advanced portfolio I produced a music magazine, which both required editing skills.

One piece of software that I used for both tasks was photoshop, and within this software I used a tool called the magic wand tool. This enabled me to super impose one picture in to another. For my music magazine Isuper imposed an image of my artist onto a plain black background to make her stand out and create an almost 3D feel to the product. This tool was very easy to use and worked effectively although I don't think that is was as quite successful as how I used it in my advanced portfolio for my cd cover. Within my cd cover I had to super impose his jumper on to a white background while making sure that it was the right size etc. this worked a lot better than my foundation portfolio as it looked a lot more professional where I was more confident with the tool.

Another technique I had to use to create my music magazine was overlapping text and images. This was to make the product more interesting and look like existing magazines. It also made the front cover look a lot more busy and full of eye catching material. I did this on photoshop using layering and rotation of images. Overall it worked well and was successful but I feel that I could have done it slightly better in that some parts were a lot less noticeable than others which was something that I was trying to avoid doing.

With my music magazine I used a transition tool called wipe right/left. I did this to make it look like this particular part of the music video was telling a story, as if the pages were being turned. I feel like this was a real risk on my behave and I found it very hard to portray but I am glad that I took the risk as I feel it made the video more interesting and different from anything else I've seen. This proves that my skills developed from foundation as I was able to use the software to the best ability and take risks with it.

For my double page spread in my foundation portfolio I used quite a busy background picture and therefore it was hard to overlap text on it that was easy to read. In order to prevent this I used colourisation and brightness to make my background image look very dramatic and rugged but still contrasting enough to be able to see the text. I feel that this worked well but because I was still new to the software I do not feel that I used this tool to its best potential.

When creating my music video I felt very confident using the software I movie so I was able to use it to its best potential. In doing this I created a fast cut montage effect by trimming shots and speeding the transitions up to make them look like flashes on a certain part of my music video when the music speeds up. This matched music to visuals really creatively and also added interest to the video, keeping the audiences attention throughout.