AS to A2 progress post

In media I believe that I am good at the creative side of the course. Getting ideas together of what our piece will be like is something I believe I have contributed strongly with. Throughout the process of making our preliminary task, through to editing it I believe I had a strong input with the creative side, costumes, actors and props. I also feel I work well in the actual process of making our video/digi pack, meaning that I am able to input ideas to the group when an issue arises with filming, for example we needed to keep a steady shot while moving the camera, but we did not have access to a dolly so we went to the science department and borrowed a small trolley from them which we placed the camera on and were able to film a moving shot of our character walking across the road. These are the kind of situations I feel I rise well too as I am good at coming up with solutions for problems we come up with.
On the other hand, I struggle with the actual editing process as I am still not completely comfortable with the mac computer and how it works. This is something I have been learning and developing although I think its one of the aspects of media studies I struggle with. Although this problem can be easily solved as if we get stuck, we google or youtube how to perform the task, meaning we're learning as we're working.
From the two practical tasks I have learnt that we need to try to get all the filming done in the same day to keep up with continuity (if the filming takes place outside) We struggled with the fact that the weather changed between the two days we filmed, meaning we had to edit the contrast of the clips to make them match. I also learnt that we need to film all our footage quickly and then get on with editing it, as we did not completely finish the editing process of our preliminary video. From this we have all learnt we need to have a proper schedule of when we are going to film, and stick to it so we are on time. I feel we carried out the digi pack task very well as we got all our pictures taken and edited quickly. We did this outside of lessons, and spent lesson time coming up with ideas for our song names, and fonts. We got all our editing done to a standard we were happy with in a good amount of time meaning that our pop princess digi pack was finished in good time.
I have learnt about the research and planning that is it a big part of the preliminary task and the actual task, as the research and planning is where you learn exactly what you're supposed to be doing. For example, I looked at many music videos and evaluated them, which helped us know what we need to do and not do. I also looked at many pop princess's digi packs to get an idea of the type of pictures we needed to take. This helped us greatly as we learnt that white is known as an innocent colour, so we used white writing on our digi pack album cover to introduce the popular idea that pop princesses are seen as innocent.
Throughout these preliminary tasks I have learnt that research and planning is a very important process as it is the basis to the ideas that create your actual piece. Our preliminary tasks have had some issues, meaning we will learn from them in our real thing such as keeping up with timing throughout and making sure we keep on top of every task we have to do. As this happened in our preliminary task we now know we need to make sure we have good time management in our actual task.