Personal Progress Report

Since the start of the Media Studies AS course, I feel as the development in understanding of myself has improved greatly. By September 2010, I knew some technical terms to do with camera techniques and mis-es-scene, but I had little knowledge of sound and editing. From beginning to study, I am now aware of all the technical terms and general knowledge I will need to know for the future within media. Alongside studying Media, through private research and teaching I now know and would like to know more about the production of films, the whole cycle that happens in order for a film to be completed, how location and marketing affects the sales, how different companies reputations and status can change the success of a film. All of these different attributions which help me to understand all about the media industry, may that be newspapers, music, TV or films, I now understand how much of an impact Media has on our everyday lives.

Since the blogger account was created, I have found myself spending my free time trying to improve blogs, learning how to use the website, and searching it for other media groups. I really enjoy using blogger as the whole idea blogging appeals to me, I read an article some point last year about the impact of blogging, so I signed up to blogger, yet after a short while I lost the willing to do it. The fact that blogger isn't completely new to me is useful as it means I have a general understanding of the website, although generally it is quite easy to understand.

I am glad to say that I have learnt how to embed a video, which has proven to be extremely useful when it comes to describing or analysing opening credits, or the format of a film, by embedding a video from youtube it allows the reader to see what I am analysing, making more sense and understanding. Another useful thing that I have learnt to do using blogger is to post photos onto the web page, or through a link, this is also another useful technique. As you can see above I have imported a photo from the Internet of different examples of media available, and I think other than helping the reader link to the undertsnaind of the text, it also makes the blog look more interesting and readable, as not many readers like pages of text without any type of graphology, by uploading photos and videos I can make the page look more interesting and readable.

Another thing that I am glad to say that I have learnt to do through blogger is to post links onto our blog, by doing this I was able to show research to any readers that follow the posts, quite often when I am analysing an opening title sequence or posting votes and references I have found about previous films, it is useful to post a link to the website I got it from, allowing the reader to get additional innformation if they need it. Quite a lot of the links I have used within my posts link to IMDB, Survey Monkey and Our Facebook Media Group, as I made a facebook account so that we could post our video and questionnaires onto facebook allowing a large variety of people all over the world to acces and complete our questionnaire, although not a lot of people know about it, or in some cases, they just cant be bothered! But it doesnt matter because we still did get some results, I found that by making our facebook account it offered people to get involved with our media, which I felt help for our group to improve.


The video below is the opening title sequence from Catch me if you can, although not a thriller, the reason why I posted this was because it was a creative and unique way of displaying the credits, in my opinion Catch me if you can has a really professional looking style, using the less modern stlye of design. As part of our research, we have been looking up a variety of thriller films, the conventions and attributions to a thriller film, and researching way in which we can make our own thriller film. I believe that through all the research I have completed, I have a comfortable understanding of what I need to know to do with media and Thrillers, although there is still a lot of room for improvement. To improve, I will watch the opening 10 minutes to a variety of different thriller films, alongside a few different stlye so that I become clearer when noticing the conventions of a thriller movie, and the way films are presented.




Above is the opening title sequence of Catch me if you can

I have found that IMDB is a really useful website, it is an online sylabus of movies, allowing the readers to discover all they would need to know about a film leading from who was in it, where it was filmed, who funded it and when it is being released. My teachers introduced me to this website, and I often use it when researching how successful a film is, and the audience responce as IMDB has a voting system, which analyses the results into different sections of audience, this was really helpful when analysing the audience feedback and response to different films.



I believe that Apollo as a group work well, we all put the effort into planning and work, and it is evident that we all have our own posts on blogger. I think although I do regularly post onto blogger, I would like to improve vastly. I intend to try and analyse, or plan a post every day of the week so that I become in a regular cycle of posting. I think that by having more regular and relevant posts my grades will improve significantly.