My critical reflection will explain some of the processes my group and I went through to produce our blog and opening sequence. I will reflect on my experience and look at what was difficult and how I managed to I proved during this year while doing my AS Media studies course. As a group we decided to do Psycho thriller because it was more interesting than horror, the usual genre that everyone picks.

We wanted to add and show more technical elements and show our ability to do a more complicated opening sequence. Our first idea was to have a businessman with a split personality as the aim character. We were going to open with him being a polite upstanding citizen by day and a vicious murderer by night. Yet because of Covid 19 and the unfortunate situation taking place all over the world, we thought this would be an amazing opportunity to document and include this changing event.

Our opening sequence has a strong representation of a global event which will be writing in history for many generations to learn about. In the past the world hasn’t seen anything like Covid 19 therefore for us to use this theme in our work is documenting history and will add to this memorable event. We have tried to challenge typical conventions by using a real event to inspire the story line as well as included the prospect of some of the proposed Covid 19 solutions and put a twist on it, so the vaccine is something that has been in the news as a possible cure. Many people on social media have debated about this vaccine, some saying they are for and some against it. We thought it would be an interesting twist to have a cash incentive to perused the people who are against. The extra twist was to add a friend giving someone the vaccine in exchange for money.

The opening sequence has a strong story line that will engage the audience. Because this is a real-life event people will be able to relate. They will be further engaged by the vaccine element of the story because this hasn’t yet happened so we played on the potential of this happening in reality and the possibilities that could bring. We used as many interesting images as possible, some to create a tense atmosphere, some to show the best of Doha and establish location. We considered copyright and sourced the music from a sharable site. We also considered the opening sequences audience and established the correct age for the content. 

My skills developed while doing this project because I had to put a lot more thought into the narrative and get a better understanding of codes and conventions. Even though I studied Media in year 10 & 11, this year was much more difficult because it was more technical. Through research I learnt the formalities of an opening sequence. We had to study many different types and consider using different technics, like animation, artistic imagery or start the film. We also had to consider using different camera angles and editing technics to interest the audience and keep them watching. We used Apple products to do this project. iPhones, iPads for filming and iMovie for editing.

We also used YouTube to allow us to be able to upload the video to our blog. We decided to use WordPress for the blog we found it the easiest of the blog platforms to use. Our strengths in this project were that we had all been media students in year 11 therefore we had all the basic skills needed. The only weakness was social distancing interrupted our plans, we couldn’t do the extras we planned and we had to communicate from a distance which was difficult at times. Despite all of these challenges we managed to produce a good product and everyone that viewed it said they loved it because it was current and relevant to our situation.