I'm going to be writing about my AS and A2 coursework, music magazine and music video, and how codes and conventions have influenced my post production decisions.
In media terms, there are four types of codes: technical, symbolic, audio and written. For both my coursework pieces, the two main types of codes I have used were symbolic and written.
In terms of digital technology, at post production stage, I mainly used GIMP (GNU image manipulation program), Picasa and Picnik for my AS post production processes. I had to think carefully about how I would make my magazine seem to be of the 'rock' genre without having to state the obvious. I decided to have the colours pink, yellow and white as my colour scheme because they are typical colours used in my style model magazine (Kerrang!), also yellow is a symbolic signifier of danger (when mixed with black) and excitement. I thought this fitted well as my style model magazine had used the colour yellow a lot when featuring 'The world's most dangerous band', I found that quite fitting.
For my DPS, my background image mainly consisted of fire. I chose this image because it represented the concept of danger once more, therefore continuing with the house style. For this article, I had to edit my photos to suit the genre of music the magazine belonged to. I experimented with the contrast and saturation to make the image darker and then added a slight orange tint. In my opinion, I think the process of experimenting with editing was very beneficial because it got me used to the program and helped me update my editing knowledge for future references.
As a part of my AS coursework, fonts were a huge part of the development process. Previously, I had not had much experience with finding and downloading fonts, I had stuck to the default fonts on Microsoft Word. The website Fontspace, opened up a whole new meaning of the word 'font;. There were hundreds of fonts that would have matched the genre of my magazine, so I rifled through them all to find ones that readers would recognise. For example, I have used a font that looks identical to the Slipknot font and I have used the official Misfits font. If my magazine was real, the choice to include existing fonts would have been extremely beneficial to improving the popularity of my magazine and the audience pleasure of my selected group.
For my OFC fonts, I used GIMP to put the title of the magazine behind the subjects' heads. It is conventional to have the texts behind the photo, so I decided to use this convention in my work. To figure out how to do this, it took the process of elimination to finally understand how. I'm glad I bothered finding time to do this as my magazine would have looked completely unprofessional otherwise.
For my A2 coursework, unfortunately I couldn't use my knowledge of print because of the medium of the text we had to create, luckily I have had previous experiences with creating a moving image project, but not as much as I'd like. A huge benefit of editing digitally is that it is no longer linear. The careful selection of footage makes the world of difference to the quality of the video. iMovie was a good program to create my video on, it wasn't too complicated and isn't a basic program either - so all in all I could create a good looking project.
On iMovie, I used transitions such as 'fade to white' and 'fade to black'. The fade to black transition is conventional of a music video as the song carries on as a sound bridge. Again, I also experimented with the contrast and saturation of the footage I had, and this was good to use when parts of my footage were slightly sunny and some had the sun behind the clouds, which affected the lighting. My most frequently used technique was cutting. At first it started off simple but got complexed as I introduced beat markers to my work. I wanted a series of still images to be at the end of the video but fitting them to the beat. This isn't very conventional for music videos although some do include still images but not all in one slot. At first, I tried to do this manually but it turned out as guess work when iMovie wouldn't let me do what I wanted. I searched the options and tabs at the top of iMovie and came across beat markers. I had to put marks on the music track where I wanted the images to start and stop, then they would fit into the designated time slot. I really liked beat markers, they kept the still images organised instead of messing the whole video up.
On reflection, I think it is very important to make the post production decisions in advance and to think them through thoroughly to get a good video at the end of it.
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