Q1.a. Digital Technology

“Digital technology turns media consumers into media producers”. In your own experience, how has your creativity developed through using digital technology to complete your coursework productions? (25 marks)

Throughout my 2 years of studying media, I have produced a film opening, titled Amnesia, for my AS product and during my year in A2 I, along with 2 other group members, produced and created a cross promotional package, which included a website, digipak and music video, promoting a new artist, named iSO. During the production of both my foundation and advanced portfolios digital technology played a massive role in allowing me to develop my ideas and in turn, developing my creativity.

As a digital native I have always been a media consumer, but throughout my A-level media course I have developed many skills in order to become a media producer. When I joined media my skills were limited, I was especially a novice when it comes to editing. At AS, our first task was to familiarise ourselves with, the editing programme we would use throughout the two years, Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, by creating a video of dancing bears. This included the basic skills of importing clips and placing them onto the timeline using the simple cutting tools. We then had the opportunity to recreate the opening scene of Juno with a partner. We had to be able to reproduce an identical version of it including the filming, costumes and editing. This enabled me to become familiar with using transitions and effects on certain clips, for example placing an animation effect over the clip so that it looked animated to match the original, in order to get the desired effect to the original clip. After completing this, we got into groups for a preliminary task as our last practise for editing and filming before our final film opening.  During editing my prelim task, I was able to put into practise all the things I had previously learnt, for example slowing the speed of the clip or making it faster.

In my year 12 foundation portfolio, I had very little experience using Photoshop, so creating a film poster was quite difficult as adding layers to my canvas was something I’d never done before, but this was where my creativity took over and allowed me to experiment with different filters on images and fonts for the text on the image. I learnt how to import images onto Photoshop, layer texts and images and add effects to the images or text, all of which were new skills. During AS, using Blogger restricted my creativity as it was limited in the ways you could lay text and images out and present posts, but I soon taught myself how to upload PowerPoints onto slide share, which enabled me to share them on my blog. I was able to use another presentational tool, Prezi, in order to share my creativity, after a few weeks. The site was fairly simple but allowed me to present my research in an interesting format with different themed templates, which in turn, enhanced my creativity.

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Throughout the planning and production of my AS product, the Internet was a key feature in my research as it enabled me to develop basic skills I previously had when searching for things by refining searches. When using the internet I was able to enhance my products creativity as I was able to choose from a range of creative sites in which I could display and present work, or search for funky font websites to enrich my film poster. Before AS, I would only use YouTube to consume media whereas in AS, YouTube became a site I used a lot more than when I was a media producer and I became familiar with uploading videos and then sharing them to other places, for example, my blog, using the embed code. I was able to use YouTube at A2 for research and evidence, it also enabled me to take inspiration and influence from specific videos and clips. I also used Survey Monkey as I needed to some feedback on what went well within my film opening and what I could improve on. This was an easy site to navigate but a useful tool to present my findings which allowed me to use the results creatively and present them in a different format.

In my A2 coursework I have used digital technology as a consumer and a producer because I have used the Internet e.g. YouTube and Google, to take in information about the rap genre that my cross promotional package was based on. From what I found and learnt, I took ideas forward and turned them into a product; music video, digipak and website. Through using software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere, I was able to develop my creativity and turn it from an idea into reality, allowing me to experiment with ideas and from the experience I gained through research and planning, I was able to judge how effective and successful this outcome was. I created a steal-o-matic on Adobe Premiere which was created as a visual moodboard, whereby I placed all of my basic skills I’d learnt from the previous year into practise as this was more of a creative presentational task compared to an editing task. Editing my final music video meant that I needed to show off all the skills I had learnt to use and even new skills too. I learnt how to apply a warp stabilizer to make sure my footage was of good quality and didn’t look messy by wobbling. We also used reverse speed which enabled us to be creative with our footage so that we could make shots rewind and look effective as well as interesting. I used another effect called feathering which made our shots interesting. We also incorporated black and white filters into our video as it tied in with our concept.  I discovered how to export a video and upload it to YouTube for media consumers, something which I never would have been able to do before starting media. The conventions of rap music video editing usually consist of lots of jump shots from one environment to another, this was something we applied consistently throughout our music video as well as making sure the editing kept up with the pace of the song. In rap music videos, the shots are often short but repetitive, this was another technique that we made use of continually throughout our music video, especially during the chorus.

In A2, I decided to create an account with photo bucket as this was a much easier format to share groups of photos but also meant I could separate them into separate albums which made it easy for anyone to look at my photos. By using the embed codes, I was able to transfer these albums onto the appropriate blog posts. I was able to use the internet as a more creative tool this year as I learnt how to create a GIF on the internet which was another presentational device that I could use to improve the creative layout of blogger. I was able to create a GIF whenever I wanted to talk about a specific shot which was useful as the GIF gave a visual demonstration too. Being a presentational tool I was unable to use last year, this enhanced my blog as it made any passage of writing much more visual so it fit with the explanation. When creating the website on Wix, I used mostly trial and error in order to learn how to use the website as it was new to me, however I had created a website on dream weaver in year 11, being mainly a teacher led task, which meant I knew what layout I wanted and how to create links to buttons and I knew how to insert social media links. However, creating the website on Wix independently was totally different as I wasn’t familiar with the programme and all the different features of it.  Another presentational tool I learnt to use in order to enhance the appearance of my blog posts, was Emaze. This site was similar to prezi but is a useful device as it allowed me to present information in a ‘journey like’ format which was simple yet effective which further developed the creativity of my blog.

In A2, I became familiar with Photoshop as it was the main programme I used in order to create my digipak and tour poster which enabled me to show off my creativity. I advanced in Year 13 as I already had a basic understanding of the software programme and I knew how to use the layers, which enabled me to experiment by using different effects on the images and fonts. We stayed with a darker colour scheme and background as this was typical in the rap genre as our research disclosed. Stereotypically, the rap genre in one way or another contains drugs and violence and this is common internationally, therefore we wanted to link this to our ancillary texts as well as our music video. We did this by being able to create shadowing effects around the text on my ‘tour dates’ poster and add a smoke effect to the image that was on my canvas already.