The Challenges Of AS Work compared to A2 Work

Nature of the Task

Compared to AS Level, the nature of this task was much more difficult as there were two sides to this task to make it a conventional music video. Linking the narrative side to the performance side was something we felt was key but was not easy. We felt that compared to AS, there just had to be one idea which would then lead into the basis for the whole task, meaning less thinking. With this project, we had to think of when certain things would happen and what would happen after that and so on, it had to be planned a lot more than first thought.

Style of Filming

The first major difference here was the fact that there was a lot more footage needed for a music video than for the opening to a short film. This was because the video had to be the length of the song we were using, and in this case it was over 3 minutes long compared to the 2 minutes from last year. With music videos we had researched, there was lot more movement in the camera, there was a much wider range of shots, in AS we used a lot of shots but they were all fixed to the camera and there was little handheld recording. Tools such as the rig were used in this project to give us a much easier movement of the camera. Although we did have a lot of footage left over, we still used a lot, which shows a difference in the demands for footage between the two tasks. Finding lots and lots of footage wasn’t an issue, but making it all interesting and different was, so we turned to the rig and other tools to achieve this.

Style of Editing

Editing proved to be very difficult. The main difference was how complicated our timeline turned out to be compared to last year. Editing took longer because we had so much footage, and because we had some much footage to use it was difficult to decide which shots were really good, and which ones was average. Another issue for editing and having so much footage was the fact that it took a longer time to covert files and go through each one, remembering which ones we planned to keep ect. The timeline was so long and complicated it was hard for us to filter each one individually, there simply was not enough time, and so we pasted attributes across slides but it would have been nice to add a unique effect on each slide as we did in AS coursework.

Amount of Work

This was the main difference between the two tasks. The amount of filming, thinking, editing, everything was so much more than that was needed in AS and this made it so difficult. Time, commitment and determination are all things which we needed a lot more of this time around than in AS in our opinion as we stayed nights after college, plucking away at the project trying to get it as best we could. It was non-stop, from the first lesson of planning, to the filming then straight into a mass of editing; the work load was huge and still has been for the blog to be completed alongside the CD covers. We feel that the main reason the work was so tough was because in editing, we had to cut the clips to the beat of the song the best we could, using some programmes we had not used before. 

Billy Greenall.