Analyzing Media Product

In my third media class, we were asked to research an inspirational blog and to study it critically in terms of what it lacks and how it is benefitting us. Me and my partner, Dua, looked around for short film blogs and finally found one which looked good in terms of organistaion and a well-researched media product. We selected this media blog because it looked very neat and organised plus the whole research, planning, construction and evaluation have been done in a chronological order which signifies that the student, Richard, knew what he was doing.
http://rjdgwpahsa2media.blogspot.com/

Richard, the student, has gone about the blog in a very orderly manner. His blog is in a chronological order with research and planning leading to construction leading to evaluation. In this blog, I was very impressed by the blogger's research. He started off with introducing his tasks and his team members and what they each were good at.

He has then researched the concept behind short films and how they work. h has deconstructing short films in order to get to the bottom line of it. Then the whole team has contributed in the ideas for the short film to be based on. These ideas have been analysed in details to the extent of the drawbacks or the limitations of each idea.

Once an idea by a team member was finalized, he has worked on the topic in itself, basing his research on the genre of their topic to come up with an idea of his own.

Basing his idea on the topic, he has come up with an idea and briefly described the story line, again going in a very systematic way about the blog.

Having done so, he has used conventions to elaborate the story line further. 

With this done, he has researched the target audience for his media product and has also suggested how the short film has been rated according to its content.

Every short film requires titles for the credits. Now, what I liked about Richard's blog was that he has even worked on this titles with his own idea in mind. Thus, again stressing on the importance of researching extensively for your media product.

With a rough draft in his mind, he has asked for feedback from his fellow students and tutor ensuring qualitative work. I like the fact that he has asked for feedback here in the very beginning of his research and planning and also, in the future during production.

He has gone about iconography for his idea, i.e the location, setting, mood and the lighting he'll require for the production of his short film. Richard, has then gone about his equipment list and the softwares he'll be needing for post-production and acquired them through his tutor day-by-day as something else was needed.

Then he went by  his team members and divided the production process between each of them according to their own expertise, so that they could go by their scripts and shot divisions and camera movements accordingly.

Now, he produced rough scripts and prop lists so that everyone has a brief overview of their job. 

Richard has made an animatic to make his storyboard look more understandable. For this animatic, too, he has researched various types of animatics and which one is the best one for his genre.

His costumes, locations and the tasks of each member are fully researched and well-planned out pre-production. I love the fact that he knows everything that he is doing and is acting out as he is thinking in a well-planned form. By his research and planning, I can ensure myself that his construction and evaluation would go just as well as the effort put  in the pre-production.

Richard’s construction, i.e. the post production is in a very orderly fashion. He has described each one of his editing, feedbacks and changes made in detail. The fact that he has made a log of all his days of shooting has inspired me into following his example as it indicates how thoroughly he was working on each of the littlest details of his media product.

When doing his ancillary tasks, he went by the procedure very systematically by, first, explaining the tasks to this readers and then going about researching the conventions of posters, identities and review pages. Having done so, he went about researching various works to come to terms with something close to what he wanted to make. Again, he has gone through extensive research just to come up with an inspirational poster, identity and a review page. The secret to his organisation is his systematic thought process due to which he has been able to work so efficiently and this is what i like most about this blog. Also, his time management is pretty much obvious by the neatness of his blog.

Even this product, when completed, was asked for feedback on to check for any improvisations which needed to be made. as you can see, Richard has been able to gain feedback throughout his media production to check for improvisations.

Now, I have pointed out what I found very interesting about this blog. The organisation, the research and the planning, how the construction developed into the final product and how feed backs have been recorded for improvements in the product. One of the major problems I had with Richard's blog is that it lacked the date and timing of his posts. So, I still don't know how he went about his blog in a timeline manner or was his media product made in a random order. Now, Richard's evaluation is in the form of videos, hence, there were statements I couldn't get proper hold of due to the language barrier.

Hence, evaluation in the form of written text must have been better for the reader or the audience, however, Richard has managed to answer these evaluation questions quite appropriately. He has referred to the conventions he has used in his media product in detail with the reasons behind each of them and how he has linked-in his short film with small unnecessary objects. He has mentioned how his media product links to the ancillary tasks. In the third question, he has mentioned how the feedback helped the team shoot, improve, re-shoot, improve and then again shoot to make the final cut for the final media product and how the text in the poster was improved as per the feedback.He has stated, in detail, the various technological equipment, the softwares and the cameras he used to get to the desired results.
All in all, after analyzing my media product I know I have a few top tips to learn from, in this blog, which will assist me in the future.

Introductory Lessons

We had our first Advanced Level Media Studies class on Thursday and during that 3 hour class we discussed our major problems with relevance to the working environment of our class in Advanced Subsidiary Level and how it needs improvement and seriousness during this year. We talked about how our work was affected adversely due to time constraints which will be continuing this year too, however, with much efforts, we decided to come up with a timeline and work through it so that our time constraints are dealt with along our work that was cut out for us. We discussed our teams of two and how we all, as a team, will be fulfilling the requirements of our media product. Our media product requires four tools i.e research, writing, visuals and technical.The research dealt with a proper plan and structure of what, how and why we will be doing our media product and how did we select our media brief. Writing requires a a proper textual analysis and evaluation and the planning of how we will be going about our product. If you have good writing skills, you know exactly how you will be representing your media production process, its deconstruction and its reconstruction. Visuals was based purely on how we make our media product and how we use our creativity, our imagination and observations to install appropriate camera angles, shots, movements, effects, signifiers and how we iconograph it in terms of clothes, location, setting, lighting, props, etc to give it the desired effect. Lastly, technical knowledge was based on a proper understanding and usage of the various technological equipment and software available to us in order to add the desired effects to our media product. We all, as a class, were asked to rate ourselves with relevance to these four tools from a rank of 1-10 so that we could help ourselves choose the best person to coordinate our strengths with. I ranked myself as:
Research: 7
Writing: 7
Visuals: 5
Technical: 5
Therefore, I needed somebody who was good at technical knowledge and at visualising. The partner I chose was Dua Malik and we both chose each other out of mutual consent because while her strong point was visualising and the technical knowledge, mine was researching and writing textual analysis. While I could provide her with the written material and the various examples and applications and information required, she could decide how to convey it through the media tools available.

In my second Media Studies class, I learnt blogging. I understood the organisation of a blog and how we can make our blogs look neat and understandable for the readers. We researched several different media studies blogs and studied various works of students and realised how much of an attention blogs alone require. Secondly, we were asked to come up with workable ideas and were asked to decide our media products within our pairs as this will be a teamwork based product. Me and my partner, Dua, decided to do either a short film or a documentary depending upon our ideas and how we can execute them with a good background topic in mind. We were able to come up with a short film idea based on arts and how it affects a girl. Our story revolved around a passionate artist who is a student and is appreciated in terms of her paintings around the school. At a certain point in time, the girl starts getting too much of an appreciation and the teacher starts feeling insecure and to overcome this emotion she starts favouring other  girls over her and pretends to hate the girl's artwork on purpose and rewards those of her classmates who used to be uncompetitive and not so good when compared to the girls hard work. This girl, after noticing and having enough of her teacher, starts feeling demotivated and starts believing that she is not good enough at what she wants to do in the future. Her passion starts fading and so does her artwork. Her work looses quality and this demotivation leads to the downfall of what was to be her career and the road to her success. We discussed this idea with our teacher and he wanted us to think deeper as arts and downfalls related to it are always common ideas used by many students, previously. We have, now, been asked to come up with something more original, enthusing and interesting. So till the next class we still have some time to come up with something better and more to the point of  where our teacher wants us to be.