Evaluation of Editing Development Across Course

Efficiency 

When first starting the course I found that I was quite bad at scheduling in editing and leaving enough time to complete all the tasks to a standard which I found acceptable to myself. To combat this issue I started creating Gannt charts to schedule entire projects in advance so that I had a visual representation of how much time I had to complete each individual task, one problem which I had with my schedules was that I gave myself too much time to plan the project and not enough time to edit the footage together, I would finish all the productions on time however, some times I felt as though it felt too rushed, some parts of the sequences you could tell had more effort and care put into them compared to other sequences which I had less time to focus on. 

Organisation 

I feel like if I was more organised I could've produced a greater volume of work to a better standard, I made sure when editing I was keeping all my footage in the same folder and then organising it into categorised bins, this made it much easier to find each specific clip I needed to create a production, I feel as though if I had implemented more organisational tactics like this such as naming each individual clip and audio file could've help keep the project running efficiently. Throughout the project I was referring back to the marking criteria to make sure I had hit each individual target, I found that using the marking criteria as a general check list helped me keep track of what needed to be completed to stay on target. 

Planning

I found that I was very good at planning the editing process, using storyboards I was able to plan out any editing decisions which I could then reference later on when editing the production. This helped keep the project running efficiently as I had a clear plan of the editing decisions I needed to make. When in the planning stage of a production I made sure to conduct research into similar media of the same nature for example when planning to create a promotional video I analysed the codes and conventions of similar promotional videos in order to gather inspiration for editing my own promotional video, this helped inform my editing decisions later on. 

Editing Abilities

I feel as though skill-wise I have developed heavily, as well as learning basic editing skills I have been able to complete more complicated edits to a good standard, for example I have experimented with ultra keying in order to replace green screens which I have placed in TV screens, I found the ultra key effect was difficult to use as I had sent an image of a green screen to play on the TV and when recording footage of the screen there footage made it look as though there was multiple tones of green therefore it struggled to recognise which tone of green to ultra key. As well as this I experimented with creating a VHS style edit on my videos, although I believe the technique looked very artistic and engaging in the video, the meaning to using the edit wasn't very clear taking away from the technique. I believe it was good to experiment with the technique as I can use it in the future on other productions. 

Overall

Over the whole HNC course I believe that my editing skills have developed immensely, my main down falls have been linked to both organisation and planning, I feel as though if I had planned all my scheduling in advance giving myself more time for the editing portion I would have been able to produce a greater volume of work to a better standard. Although, I believe the planning could be improved, I still believe the work that I did complete in the strenuous time restraints was completed to a good standard with a good justification to why I was making each editing decision. Over the year I learnt a lot of different editing techniques which I have used within my projects, for example, a technique which I used a lot which I feel I was really able to develop was the use of montages, I found that when trying to deliver a lot of information to the audience in a short amount of time whilst keeping them engaged, the best choice of action was placing a montage in the video for example, my film studies project was entirely a montage of a female trying to break away from gender conformity. I also later used the same concept as montage when producing my music video, I was trying to tell a story to an audience in 3 and a half minutes through the use of a song and visuals, montage follows a similar concept therefore, having experience producing similar media products was helpful. Throughout the project I made sure to constantly critique my own work and write evaluation in order to show how I could improve each project, I have done this so that with every project I could learn from my mistakes and do better, in the music video unit I created a post which contained examples of the editing techniques I had used in the music video, in this post I was able to justify why I had made each editing decision and I was also able to reflect on how well the editing technique worked, I found that keeping organised and having all of my editing decisions written down helped me later on when writing final evaluations and helped me finish off the final video to a better standard as I was able to evaluate the decisions I was making as I was completing them. If I was to go back and repeat the year I believe I would have implemented more organisation tactics like this to help me justify each editing decision and to help me evaluate my process and find ways to improve further in the future. As well as this I believe I would try harder to label all my clips and audio files as well as bins as this would help me find files a lot easier so that I could finish the project faster.