Many things have been learnt from this Assessment, in which the students of Media 1 were expected to create a 2 minuted edited sequence of footage(both found and recorded) in the form of a self-portrait of someone we knew. My portrait took the name ‘Richard the Lionheart’ and was based on my grandpa. The most successful aspect of my project comes itself from the most problematic. I decided to do the self-portrait on my grandpa, a smart choice as he holds many interesting stories and values but also a hard one as he has trouble speaking clearly and much of the footage I collected was unusable.

The main problem I found was that I did not create a plan in terms of what I was going to ask grandpa or what the premise of my portrait would be, I simply went to his house and filmed him talking about his life. This proved to be terrible planning as I then had unusable footage due to him not being audible and also a lack of a base or story in my video. I had done it backwards and was trying to make a story out of my footage rather than get footage for a story. I was able to realise my mistake however and spent time making a plan and premise for my portrait around the title ‘Richard the Lionheart’, thus I returned to grandpa’s with specific questions in mind. This premise of Richard(Grandpa) having a big heart helped me say something interesting. I faced another problem as the video’s in premiere were different dimensions to the pictures so they looked extremely small on the screen, so I ended up having to remove them and only use pictures and recordings because my premiere trial ended in one day.

I was able to learn that it is far easier to make a self-portrait interesting with a key premise to investigate and explore. Everything must be planned for, and you must know exactly what footage you want and how you will use it. Producing portraits is a great way to learn about someone else and also yourself, giving you a different outlook on life and the world. It enables you to show personality in different ways from different points of view. Overall, this process has helped me to realise the amount of effort that must go into pre-production for even the smallest projects, and how important it is to adapt on set when things go wrong. I was also able to appreciate the help of others and teamwork, as my mum took me to grandpa’s and was able to suggest things I might ask Richard or points I might make as she grew up living with him and knows him far better than me. This was quite a stressful project as my computer and editing program gave me trouble but I did learn a number of lessons and was able to engage closely with my grandpa.