21/06/17– As my first post on my new Media Blog, I have decided to write it during my week away from school, at my work experience. As we haven’t begun the content needed for year 13, I am making use of my time by learning about the Journalism world. So right now(June 19th 2017), after I returned from my study leave, all Year 12 students embarked on the excitement of Work Experience. As my Career Aim is to become a Journalist or work within the media reporting/broadcasting News, I decided to work with Tim Baker at his company in Bishop’s Stortford. This is helping me gain an insight to the publishing and journalism life, and is also allowing me to write my own article to be published in The Tower Magazine. This experience will benefit my Year 13 Media Studies as when making a magazine/poster I will use my experience with Emily, the Graphic Designer to create the best possible product.
After my week at TBA Publishing, I have gathered information surrounding the media and gained an insight to the journalism world. As well as benefiting my A-Level Media Class, it will help my career in the long run. This includes learning about so-called ‘Fake News’, seeing what the public are interested in Magazine wise, and learning about the media world and it’s belongings.
28/06/17- Today in class, we arranged our groups with consists of Tasha, Charlotte, Emily and I. We sat down and discussed the genre, plot, music and sound effects needed for our trailer. Today we decided Drama/Thriller, which will feature a teenage girl. The sound effects we will need so far is a TV switching on, festival/summer music, a news report, and a background music. However, this is only a rough idea and we will all need to think of individual plots before deciding on a final one.
05/07/17- Today in class we discussed which trailers we will be deconstructing within our groups. I decided on four genre specific trailers which are – Gone Girl, Intruders, Unforgettable and Shutter Island. The other non-genre specific trailers I decided on were Everything everything, Pitch Perfect 3, Spiderman Homecoming and Moulin Rouge. This will help us look at the conventions specific to the type of trailer we want to make as well as looking at other trailers that are non-genre specific to see what a variety of trailer do include and we will take bits from both genre specific and non-genre specific to create our final one.
13/07/17- We sat down individually today and thought of trailers we could potentially create. I came up with a trailer about a romance between a boy and two girl bestfriends, which is very cliché and conventional and the rest of my group came up with their own. We then created storyboards to fit our genre and trailer idea.
19/07/17- Today in class my group and I discussed our separate trailer ideas and decided to go with Tasha’s storyboard and plot. This involves a montage of a teenage girl enjoying her summer until she goes missing. This idea is similar to the first one we thought of when we first grouped up together.
20/07/17- Today is the last day of term until we return in September after summer, I will be keeping my blog posted throughout the summer holidays as my group and I will hopefully be filming our trailer during the holidays. We have conferred and decided when we will be meeting to film and what shots we need Charlotte to get as she goes on holiday. We also filmed George, Caitlin and Aimee reading a monologue to see whether we picked the right actresses and to see whether George would fit the roll of our News Reporter. We also need to find a parent/sibling character to read some lines to see who will should chose to play the role of the distraught parent/sibling.
11/08/17- Caitlin, Aimee, and Charlotte has just returned from holiday and Char has shown Emily and I the shots she received over the holiday. We now have plenty of footage to start editing our trailer, and putting the plot together.
21/08/17- Emily, Charlotte, Caitlin, Aimee and I just returned home from V Festival where we managed to get plenty of shots of Caitlin enjoying herself naturally. These shots will be beneficial when we put together our trailer as we will show some diversity within the beginning of the trailer, showing a range of activities Caitlin engaged with over the summer.
08/09/17- Today in class we reviewed all the footage we gathered over the summer and wrote our first draft of the script which we placed onto our blogs as a rough copy. We then started discussing music and dialogue we can dub over the scenes we filmed.
18/09/17- This week in lessons we have been reviewing the theorists and really studying them in depth to make sure we are certain on the theories and views they have come up with so we can apply them to our exams next year and our trailers.
25/09/17- After studying the theorists we have separately put together an essay so we really understand the full depth of the theorists’ ideas and how we can apply them.
29/09/17- Today we played around with the green screen and videoed myself with the green screen in the background to get a rough idea of how the editing works and what we need to do to get Jaq’s scene perfect. We got help from the technician in the school who helped us sort the lighting out and set up the green sheet that we will be using. We laid it as flat as we could against the wall and changed the lighting situation to make sure nothing shows up when were editing.
Jess Stevens' A Level Media blog 