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 my skills in using digital technology contributed to my process of creative decision making from my foundation portfolio to my advanced portfolio.

In my foundation portfolio we created a thriller film opening in which we shot in two different locations. As we hadn’t yet edited sequences we felt that Final Cut Express would be a basic and suitable program to use, therefore my skills in Final Cut express were rudimentary as the program was new too me at this stage. After experimenting with different tools we learnt how to put the footage together, cut sequences and fade and tone down the soundtrack to fit in with the action in the frames. We also used a program called Adobe Aftereffects to create the titles in the opening. My group and I had a little difficulty using it as  we had never used it before and it was quite complex.

Therefore for my advanced portfolio, me and my partner chose to stick to using Final Cut and expand our knowledge on the program and learn more effects and ways of making our product more marketable. In this project we had to create a music video for a song of any genre, for which we did one for Jack Johnson’s songs ‘Better Together’. I knew my skills of using Final Cut were lacking and so in my spare time I decided to explore the range of tools on the program and practice putting footage together.  I learnt how to sync the footage with the music, layer and fade shots together using the ‘pen tool’, add transitions between the frames and play around with colour levels to ensure each shot was clear and professional. This shows how I have developed my skills in terms of Final Cut in both my foundation and advanced portfolio. I took the initiative to learn how to use the program, something I would not have done in my foundation portfolio, which helped me become more confident and enable me to produce a more polished product. 

Another program I used in my advanced portfolio was Adobe Photoshop. I was very familiar with the many tools and effects it provided as I use it frequently and so did not have any problems editing the images for our album covers and magazine adverts.  Creating these required use to take photographs, for which we used a HD 12 pixel camera. This gave us clear photographs which were then easier to edit as it was able to capture the light well. In contrast to our foundation portfolio we used more advanced and a better quality HD video camera which was able to pick up the sound and lighting impressively. Whereas in our foundation portfolio we used a canon HD camera which wasn’t as successful as most of our footage in our opening was blurry. 

To plan and market our products we used Web 2.0. In my foundation portfolio I created a very basic blog on which we displayed our production process. This process of blogging meant that me and my group were able to work more effectively. We used YouTube to watch thriller openings and upload our opening to gain feedback. However in our advanced portfolio we widened our use of Web 2.0 by not only using YouTube but using Facebook as well to share our products. Facebook enabled us to gain positive and negative feedback which would help us in improving and amending our product to be its best. 

 

In conclusion I feel that I have developed many skills from AS to A2 to make better creative decisions. I have developed these skills by expanding my knowledge in software’s to create better effects and using more advanced technology to capture better quality footage to create an overall more professional and marketable final product.