Digital Technology Essay

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.

Digital technologies have had a massive influence on media production over the last few years, throughout the duration of both years I have learnt a massive amount about how to use them and what the benefits are of using them.  They in turn have contributed and have had a massive impact of the quality of work and the finished products that I have produced over the past two years.

One piece of digital technology was iMovie, this played a massive part and was a vital piece of digital technology in both years 12 & 13, without iMovie I would have had to use a different piece of digital technology which could’ve been a lot more complex to use and navigate around, but iMovie was beneficial to me as I found it very easy to use due to its simple structure and layout. As time went on I became much more efficient with iMovie, my AS work shown us editing a short music video for ‘Busted – What I Go To School For’ in this video there were little effects used as I didn’t have the ability to create them at this point. However, this changed as I progressed in the year and it then became apparent that I had developed my skills using this digital technology within the final version of my A2 music video. I used a varied amount of effects with the advantage of using iMovie such as slow-motion effects at points where the song escalated into a sort of “drop”. Due to the song being fairly electronic iMovie became beneficial in producing a “glitchy” type of effect this gave our music video much more of a lively effect which we were unable to create without a crowd. The finding of these skills were visible on other existing texts that I had been looking at in the research and planning process, this helped my creative decision making process as my ideas in effects were used on my own product.

Another beneficial piece of Digital Technology was Photoshop; again this was a contributing factor in both years of my work. Without Photoshop I would’ve had to use software such as Microsoft Publisher, this would have made parts of my work lack in quality, but Photoshop gave me the ability to add new key factors to my work as I had a wide selection of tools to choose from. Photoshop give me the ability to do all kinds of things to images such as manipulation and cropping etc. An example of this would be the skull replacing the ‘o’ in the title ‘Mothership’ on my final version of my Digipak & Poster. I did this as I became familiar with this particular piece of digital technology using various tools such as the magnetic lasso tool.  I could tell I had developed in the use of this tool due to looking back at my AS magazine. I saw that the cropping around the edge of certain images looked poor in parts whereas the cropping around my A2 ancillary products shown professionalism. Photoshop allowed me to expand my creative decision making process due to being able to use a wider range of tools.

Blogger was also used within the two years of both AS and A2, It was used to convey the majority of the coursework. We had very little experience of this website prior to this but had a small understanding of how it worked due to using other blogging websites such as Tumblr. At A2 we developed our skills with the use of Blogger as we found out that we could do our A2 music video group work on it (Research & Planning etc.), this enabled us all to post at the same time whilst keeping all our work together in one organised blog. As I progressed through AS I realised that tags could be added to posts, this made navigating around my blog much easier.

Overall, digital technology was a vital factor in allowing us to make good creative decisions in our A2 and AS productions as well as making our productions effective in ways that real media conventions have achieved.