Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.
I am going to discuss how I think that digital technology during our media production meant we were able to make different creative decisions and produce our AS and A2 coursework pieces. For AS we were asked to produce a preliminary school magazine to practice and get to grips with the digital media, we were then asked to produce a music magazine, contents page and double page spread. For A2 we were asked to complete a preliminary exercise as a class by recording our own copy of the music video for Busted ‘what I go to school for’, we then had to produce a music video of our own, we had to choose the song, artists, styling etc and produce a realistic video.
Before starting the course I had never attempted to use as complicated a program as Photoshop to edit and alter images and text so at AS level it was completely new to me, so only improvement could be made. Since then I have learnt various skills such as cutting images, creating layers and adding text, I have learnt all this from practicing and experimenting with the different tools available on Photoshop and would now say that I am skilled in the program and have been able to create two magazine covers, contents page, double page spread, advert and digipak using digital technology.
For our AS coursework to create a music magazine we had to create style and take the photographs ourselves. I looked on websites such as ‘coverjunkie’ and ‘dafont’ to gain inspiration, On the cover of my music magazine (MUSIQ) I used inspiration from other magazines and used a very similar text to various ‘pop’ magazine covers and copied the text layout around the image I used a standard Digital camera to take the images this was fine for what I wanted and produced decent clear images that I could edit using Photoshop after, For our A2 coursework being to produce a music video we upgraded to a more capable and specialised HD Panasonic video camera this allowed us to take risks and try new things when recording.
On the preliminary exercise for our A2 work we created as a class filmed busted ‘what I go to school for’ at this stage we had basic knowledge of recording and editing film, we put the clips together using I movie, by then learning how to use imovie we then were able to move ontp a more advanced program for our A2 music video and edited our video on the macs using the software final cut pro.
Skills we used on final cut pro were syncing the clips to the music making sure the lip syncing matched, cutting and shortening clips so the video flowed, slowing clips down in the slower areas of the song and speeding them up in the dance areas, we also edited clips by replaying and rewinding them to add to the dance/ dj effect we wanted to create. We added different effects to the black and white sections in the video adding contrast to the image so they in keep with the eye catching and ‘popping’ out of the screen appearance we wanted to carry threw, for this we used an effect on final cut called ‘alien lab’. We made the decision to create a twitter feed and linked it onto our blog this meant it created a brand for our artists.
Throughout both of my portfolios I sued blogger to document the processes I was carrying out, this was extremely helpful to me because it’s meant that I could compare my work and track my progress, you can see the improvement from AS to A2 on my blog by the amount of post and detail I have included during production stages.
To conclude after I had grasped the idea of Photoshop it then meant I was able to expand my creative ideas and make more efficient decisions in the production of my media products, Digital technology permitted me to develop and enhance my skills over AS and A2 to create unique and original ideas, this permitted me to showcase all my knowledge and developed skills to produce a professional and technology looking final media piece.
