Post-production essay

"How important has the post-production stage been in your foundation and advanced portfolios and how have your skills developed over these two years?"

The post-production stage for me has been very instrumental in the production of my foundation portfolio thriller opening and advanced portfolio music video. I believe that the opportunities to edit my raw footage really enhanced the ideas I wanted to create.

For both my projects I used the software apple imovie to put the pieces together. During my thriller opening production, imovie allowed me to add transition effects such as the fade to white. This was a effect I used predominantlyfor my thriller opening in the hope that it would represent my character about  to reflect on her previous experiences; the use of a flashback is a convention of thriller films that I decided to amplify to match my project to real products. From the use of the flashback I could allow the audience to gain some incite into the character's history and suggest further themes in my proposed thriller movie. The transitions I used for my advanced portfolio were predominantly for style over content. I realised that the use of transitions within my music video should be minimalistic and not intended to provoke an emotional response therefore I incorporated a lot of straight cuts and quick fades that would initiate fast cut montages. Instead of creating connotations simply through my transitions I was able to create connotations via the linking of the frames via the transitions and by doing this I could address the relationship between the visuals and the audio. By understanding more about transitions and the effects they have on the audience it helped me develop my skills in terms of awareness of where to include them within my music video production.

Eisenstein was a theorist who believed that editing was the foundation of film art. One of his editing styles he created was the 'intellectual montage' a technique that incorporated editing style that stimulated thought. This editing style is only effective when juxtaposed with other frames to create metaphoric meaning. I believe that this is a style that I contradicted with my thriller opening as many of the frames that were edited together were done so for continuity and a simple jump to the next location. My advanced portfolio music video however did incorporate Eisenstein's intellectual montage technique. Some of my shots involved my character handing out love hearts to the public followed by close-up shots of the recipient smiling and accepting the offer. As these shots were juxtaposed it creates the metaphoric sense of happiness and love generated from my characters actions. I believe the use of theory within my post-production was more evident within my advanced portfolio as I could link the processes and outcome to the theories I had previously researched.

My knowledge and use of colourisation was evident within both my foundation and advanced portfolio. With my thriller opening I used the preset image effect 'bleach bypass' which worked really well. The use of this effect created an emphasis on the dark brown and black colours which aided me in obcuring the identity of my character. When juxtaposed against other scenes within my thriller opening, the bleach bypass effect really stood out and created a sense of enigma which I intended to provoke. I took more control with my music video via the use of changing the raw image properties in oppose to using a preset effect. By doing this I could boost the saturation and contrast to really make the colours I wanted stand out. I believe editing the selected clips was relatively easy and it allowed me to make decisions specific to the clip in order to offset any excess lighting, by doing this I was able to create a music video with frames that all had the same colours. By boosting the colours within my advanced portfolio I was able to address the quirky feel to the music as the overall project looked more fun; because I further enhanced the relationship between the audio and visual it allowed my audience to consume the media with more ease.

Both my foundation and advanced portfolio featured the effect of speed alteration to increase appeal. My thriller opening incorporated two scenes where the real-time speed was slowed down. Imovie allowed me to select my desired frame and specifically reduce the speed to suit my preferences. By doing this I hoped that it would add emphasis to the action; the frames I slowed down included a character running away from the camera and another character dropping onto the floor. I believe that by slowing down the action it created the feeling that the efforts of the character running where becoming less impacting and his task seemed harder; whereas for the second character hitting the floor I attempted to create a sense of giving up by adding the slow motion to elongate the falling action.