Final Reflection

 It's all coming to an end. Tomorrow I will be sharing something I have been working on since February, and you guys have been with me through this whole journey. Last year I chose Media AS Level because I wanted to try something new, while trying something new I found something that I really enjoy. I learned so much throughout these two years of Media Studies. Although it is only 5 minutes, so much work has been put into this short excerpt. 

From the beginning of this class I knew I wanted to create a documentary. I knew that I had to do something meaningful to me. So I chose to stick to something special about me, my country and moving to America. It was something that was also accessible to film during this time. This documentary is extremely special to me because I got to interview my father and learn about my move to America, I was extremely young and I don't really remember the journey, on the other hand, for my parents it was a huge change in their lives. So this idea was really personal to me and something enjoyable to work on!

After establishing my idea I had to gather research to create a good foundation for the documentary. I researched immigration to the United States, but mostly Miami, because that was the focus of my extract, moving from Romania to Miami. I also researched target audience of course because (and I said this last year) it is what is important to keep the audience attentive and attract them. This year the portfolio project had more components, it was a package and because we learned about how to promote media we had to create a social media page. Social media has been a big part of my life, I had first downloaded Instagram at a young age and I have become very familiar with the application, I chose Instagram because it has become a very big part of sharing information. I created a business page to be able to see insights and make it easier to promote the docu series.

Editing this year was great! I used Final Cut Pro last year and I was not familiar with it at all. I have been using it and playing around with it since last year and although I am no professional, I can safely say that my skills have improved massively. The one obstacle I came across was that I was using the trial and it ran out so I lost what I had been editing. However, I was able to use my fathers trial on his laptop so I had to quickly get back to editing. Some new features I found were audio effects which I thought were really cool, I messed around with them but didn't really use them in the extract. Something else I had to learn to fix was when I imported my footage it converted the HDR footage to SDR which was very annoying because it messed with the lighting, I researched what I could do and found a video on how to fix this through the settings, so now I am very happy with how it looks. 

My magazine article was also just overall enjoyable to write. When I first thought magazine article I had no idea what to write about, but I spoke with my teacher and she gave me some great ideas, the one that stuck with me was a director interview. I researched a great deal of director interviews and connected commonalities between questions which helped me form my own questions. My teacher also recommended I use Canva a great online tool which I used to design my magazine article. 

Overall, this was such an enjoyable project, that had its ups and downs, but I persevered through! I learned so much and I am so grateful for this class. I hope you guys enjoy my piece tomorrow as much as I enjoyed creating it! See you guys tomorrow! 😁