The start of something new...

AS Media Studies:

Realizing that I have a keen interest in world events, culture, media hype, advertising, and just general media, i was attracted to take media.

I am interested to know what happens on and off camera and the process of creating films and adverts. I like to deconstruct things, and realise that products are more than what it seems on the surface.

A LATE COMER:

Coming into Media late, I had to catch up on quite a lot in a small amou

nt of time. The first task to do was to create a poster of a new horror film named "The trees" with a sub caption of "Don't go into the wood today".

We had to take our own photos with the school cameras, being a Digital SLR camera. I took many pictures of the local wood in my area, some low shots to create a sense of dominating scary trees, i also wanted to play on the sub caption "Don't go in to the woods today" and use a bear isolated and eerie...

I had a picture of a dirty teddy bear in a log, then i lassoed that and put it onto a picture of scary overpowering trees. It was hard work and pushed my patience to make the lassoed picture of the teddy and blur it in to create more natural setting. I zoomed in quite a lot and had to go over and over to opaue/blur the edges. It looked effective making the little sky there was dark and misty, i used the opaque darkener and created a glow on the bear. However, the poster didn't save and the computer crashed. So i lost my patience and created a poster in about 5 minutes. A created an inverted night vision effect on the trees. The used 'tom violence' font, in red.

So, now we had our photos we can improve them and enhance them using Photoshop. We discussed some of our experiences with Photoshop, and generally not many students had used it, and if had not well. My experience with Photoshop was the "fond" memory of getting irritatingly frustrated with a Mac computer as I managed to create a complete mess and freeze the computer. So not great really. We went through it step by step. To grasp the techniques well and easily, we did have to know our media terminology. Like shot angles, aperture, saturation etc. Tools were explored in Photoshop like the lasso, which captured an object you wanted to capture, but even better my favorite, was the magnetic lasso which predicted what you wanted to lasso, and 98% of the time it was correct, and therefore much neater and better. I experimented with copy and pasting on top of pictures but this can look false, but there is a way to cheat this, if you zoom in onto the picture using the magnifier button and blurring the edges of your pasted item. once you zoom out, this looks fart more natural. There are more tools to use, but they were the tools i used most in this lesson. Now I have the patience for this program, i shall be able to experiment with the other tools. USING PHOTO SHOP FOR MY HORROR POSTER: Starting this, you have to make sure you have your images in a JPEG format. ....



USING A CAMERA:

I missed our photo shoot and Photoshop lesson as i had not joined media yet. However I had caught up on what i had missed out and found out about using a camera and Photoshop in my own time.
For a more professional photo we learnt about angles...
Close up (C.U)
Extreme Close up (E.C.U)
Mid Shot (M.S)
Long Shot (L.S)
These are for establishing the area, location, surrounding of characters and objects or situations.
High Angles (H.A)
Low Angles (L.A)
Over the Shoulder Shot (O.S.S)
These angles are to create feelings and emotions. over powering characters, the audience as having the status or objects with some significance.
For the camera work, we used a FIJI 1800. We had to think about

1. Rule of thirds
2. Leveling
3. Manual Changing
4. Aperture
5. Shutter speed
And for this on the display screen, there was a guidance grid in which we had to stay into, to create a well balanced professional picture.

A film Review:

2006 brought out the film 'Guardian' starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher. It's a gripping film about coast guards and the story of the most successful coast guard, Kevin Costner and his traumatic experience of all his crew killed in a cataclismic accident during a rescue, where he was slightly responsible pushing it, trying to save one more life. He is so traumatized by this he is made to teach the trainee coast guards. Ashton Kutcher is one of many aspiring coast guards; very arrogant and an excellent swimmer for his high school. From when Ashton kutcher's character and Costner's meet from then on, their conflict is thereon established and pushed. Costner's, style of teaching his passion and his attitude push the trainees to a point of leaving and only the strongest survive. Costner and Kutcher conflict however like a good film we realise they are two very similar personalities’ backgrounds and objectives. The story starts with a myth about the Guardian in the seas, who save and aid stranded people at sea until they are rescued. This is spoken by Costner, at the end of the film Costner dies at sea on a rescue mission where Kutcher attempts to save him. Anyway, we get the impression that Costner is the Guardian of the sea. I loved this film as the relationships developed were fantastic and that heart wrenching story grips you with the passion that is shown by the coast guards. Also the way it was filmed was peculiar, I don't know what it was but it had a documentary feel about it, and it followed the story of this amazing person. Also, the soundtrack was great, kasabian. So, yeah, this is a hyperlink from rottentomatoes.com.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/guardian/