Prompt
Compare and contrast your movie reviews with your production project. How have your production skills grown over the semester? As the “director” of these projects, what was most important to you as you put them together? Do you feel you reached those goals? What, in your opinion, is the most important concept or skill you learned during this course? If you had to take the course again, what would you do differently?
Commentary
Coming into this class, I had a little bit of editing experience from previous classes. So creating these production projects, especially the vlogs, was not an unfamiliar concept for me. With that being said, I do think my skills have grown over the semester because, by the end of the semester, I could edit a video together in significantly less time compared to my first project. I believe I just became very comfortable with the routine of creating these vlogs and learned lots of tricks from my editing software, that made the process much easier.
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Within production, it was very important to me that my end product was informative, concise, cohesive, and enjoyable to watch. And so, I decided to use the same sort of layout/structure for each one of my movie vlogs the same way. I structure/edit my videos in a way that flows very similar to an essay. There is a clear introduction, “body paragraphs” or my main points of argument, evidence, and a conclusion. The evidence I provide always supports my claims/arguments, and oftentimes the evidence consists of clips of the film or scene embedded into the video. This helps the viewer follow my points easily because the clips work as an example and as support for the claim I am making. Plus, I believe that the cute little introduction and “header” clips are aesthetically pleasing and add a bright and bubbly aspect to my videos.
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Furthermore, I feel as though I accomplished all my goals within my projects throughout the year. I feel as though they are all very informative and reflect the concepts we learned in class well, while also being concise and easy to follow for any reader/viewer. To be honest, if I had to retake this course, I don’t think I would have done anything differently. I worked very hard on all of my production projects and am proud of how they turned out.
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Finally, I believe the most important concept we learned this semester is the breakdown of mise-en-scene. This could just be my personal preference, but I love being able to take a film and analyze specific elements of it and connect those elements to a greater theme, or “why”. For example, in class, we reviewed how a producer's use of sound attributes to the film and how it might change. This concept is something I now pay attention to in just about every movie I watch. I enjoyed learning this concept because it is something I apply to my life now, and how I watch and appreciate films.