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.

In year 12 my As brief was to create an opening scene for an upcoming film or TV show. In year 13 for my advanced portfolio the brief was to design and create a professional music video with ancillary products to support it. The ancillary products were two things; a website and digipack. For all sections of my coursework both As and A2 research was most prominent in determining the conventions of each product and who the potential target audience would be in order that the production might be successful.

Therefore for my As coursework I concentrated on determining who the target audience would be by  conducting various research on the internet , creating a questionnaire on survey monkey and placing it on a web 2.0 like Facebook for people to give their opinions on what they would like to watch. Also by examining many different TV shows so that I could deconstruct the product to a certain key convention e.g. sticking to the codes developed by Prop 31 conventions  and Todorov narrative and equilibrium. From this I determined that the opening scene need to be youth related so we decided to create a gang culture opening for the basis of the TV show. Because from the internet research it was clear that successful production work centred on creating moral panic among society concerning teenagers, the most popular was gang culture. This allowed me to experiment with stereotypes and compare with existing products on the market.

For my A2 portfolio I had to create a music video and ancillary products. Again I found the internet extensively useful in finding current examples of these with conventions to follow, allowing me also to create a questionnaire again for the chosen target audience and putting it on a social media website Facebook.  However I was able to find different kinds of music videos which centred on different things for a different audience. In particular the genre of rock or indie focused on demonstrating an artistic and postmodern video for their target audience whereas hip-hop and R&B focused on establishing the artist and making him prominent.  After this research was done I came up with the idea of following the conventions found in “Diggy Simmons video do it like you” which focused on the protagonist wooing his love interest which can expand the target audience to demographic of 16-49 year olds. This is inspired my final product as I used a protagonist to woo his love interest. Without the initial research I may not have been able to come up with such a strong final piece.

So for my As production ways in which I used digital technology was not only present in the research task and bettering my skills in using a questionnaire based website, but also in understanding software. The first software that I came across was adobe after effects in creating visual effects, lighting and composition to a scene; I learnt most of my beginner skills by initially checking the research I made previously, also looking up tutorials on YouTube as a step by step guide. The immediate con of doing this is that didn’t fully understand the many functions I was using in both Adobes after effects and Photoshop. Therefore I couldn’t use it as effectively as I hoped to, due to this my creative decision making was scrutinized I had to evaluate what I could and couldn’t do, therefore if wanted to do something for the final product yet had no way of going about it I wouldn’t do it all. For example there was the opening scene of an orb in the short clip that need to have sound yet I had no way of putting it in. Despite not being able to do it, it did not at all discourage my creativity but urged me in  to push on in my spare time to better my skills in using adobe based programmes so that limitations like that wouldn’t occur in A2.

Software used in the production for my As coursework was final cut pro to compile the shots we took into one. Again I used the initial research and tutorials to teach me on a beginner level on how to use the programme. As previously I ran into the con of not fully understanding what I was doing to my production work, it was more of a guess game, hoping for the best result. This however encouraged my creativity to explore so many different avenues of how to make the shots we took into a professional piece of work. One example is adding the credits into the scenes in order that the clip might be taking more seriously as a short film. This allowed the video to stick to the conventions of many other existing products.

But when it came to the A2 production my skills had developed beyond a beginner to what some would consider to be advanced. One reason in particular to why this was, is because I knew exactly what I was doing when it came to using programmes such as final cut and photoshop.  I had improved so much in both software’s that have even remembered the short keys in accomplishing certain task like feathering and masking scenes and images.

My A2 production had less limitations than As , for example when it came to filters and lighting for my As i wouldn’t be able to do it, and if I were able I wouldn’t be 100% sure if I could repeat it. But for my A2 production such a problem did not rise at all because after As I had revised and learnt the software used in media in order to be proficient.

The ancillary products was where I best utilized my new skills especially in photoshop for the digipack, being that the music video was more dependent on actual footage. In photoshop i was able to extensively edit the photos we took for the digipack, by removing any blemishes & spots, giving our protagonist clean skin and then adding filters to enhance the aesthetic appeal in order that it might revolve around the codes and conventions we had gotten from existing products.

In comparison to As production where the best I could do is crop and resize images in photoshop.

In A2 I was able to make considerable progress and build on some of my own perceived post production weaknesses , for example in As I had  never made a website to promote an artist so making a website for this purpose was quite new to me. I had to use the internet to find official artist websites. Tinie tempah official website had a variety of different components and elements on his webpage but could be confusing for some people, It did have links to Twitter and FB and other social networking pages to keep his fans keep up-to-date with him. The colour scheme was quite plain which I noticed with other websites of artists in the same genre. I wanted to keep my website plain and simple also and to make it link in with the music video and album cover so the homepage had a small introduction.

To conclude, the two years of working on these individual production pieces I feel that my editing and ablitiy to use digital technologies such as Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and final cut pro has improved massively.