Reflecting back on AS year: Technical skills learnt in AS

AS was a good year for me, a chance for me to expand my skills and knowledge about media studies. We learnt a variety of things, from TV Drama and representations to the music industry. However, I am going to discuss the technical side of things that helped us with the making of our thriller films last year, such as Final Cut Pro, LiveType and Soundtrack Pro.


Final Cut Pro was the key to our thriller making days. It allowed us to make an opening from scratch. Once I grasped the basics of Final Cut Pro, such as match cutting, it became fairly easy. The most difficult part of using this program was editing, as sometimes it affected the audio and video, making it out of sync. On the other hand, once editing was mastered it really improved the quality of the clips. Editing allowed us to change the contrast and brightness of the video, and even the hue so we could make it a rosy hue for a romantic setting, or dark and blue for a cold, sombre feeling. Overall, I learnt how to import clips, export clips, and make two clips appear in one scene.

LiveType was somewhat harder to conquer, but overtime I learnt the basics of it. LiveType is a program designed to make animated texts to put onto whatever you want to, or on it's own if you want. I learnt how to have different backgrounds behind the text and how to animate the text in two different ways; professional and informal. The only thing that could have been improved was the variety of font it had, as it was very basic, but we worked our way around it and found out that dowloading fonts made it appear on LiveType, so that was a good skill learnt for this year.

Soundtrack Pro was probably one of my favorite things to learn. I loved combining all the different sounds, from people screaming to an acoustic track. I also learnt how to adjust the volume, and even make the final audio product fade out and fade back in. I also learnt how to import it into Final Cut Pro, which also learnt me the importance of knowing how to import and export different things into different programs.

Overall I think I learnt a lot and I cannot wait to put forward and incorporate my ideas and skills into my music video.

Until then!

Stephanie