Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Exam SECTION A q.1: digital technology


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.

Before starting our productions I made
Our preliminary involved…
At AS I made..
At A2 I made..

Blogger + Presentational tools were an essential part of the production process as I researched, planned, recorded and sought feedback for my production using tools such as Pinterest, Tumblr and  ScoopIt! to collate research which shaped my decision making and helped me organize my creative decisions efficiently, especially the access to professional examples that I intended to emulate. Communication tools were already part of my everyday working methods (Facebook, Evernote, Skype, email, BBM, Instagram) so that I could work effectively with my group and these I developed and extended during the 18 months to include Twitter as a research tool (following Alan Rusbridger’s advice that Twitter as a search engine rivals Google, and acts as a news aggregator for relevant information). In order to create evidence supporting the creative decisions that lay behind my productions at AS, I used digital presentational tools like Slideshare and Prezi embedded in my blog and by A2, I was using New Hive (an interactive infographic) to collate my work.

From the start, I used digital equipment to film my movie work using a Digital camera Canon 550D to make Cherie ( a practice film opening) and my prelim. I also made ancillary products: at AS, I made a set of marketing tools to promote my film using the digital camera (film poster, webpage design) and online digital tools such as facebook and Twitter to market and distribute my film. I created an audience profile in Photoshop based on NME’s.

To edit my film work, I have used Apple Macs both at school and at home I quickly became very competent editing in Adobe Premiere (for prelim & comedy ), learning to make our comedy opening using green screen, audio, soundtrack, colour correction etc……….. I am particularly pleased about learning to use After Effects to make………
Later I moved to iMovie to edit my music video where laying down the soundtrack was easy but the lip-synching in the editing much more challenging as it was very precise work with a huge number of edits and transitions. As Heidi Peeters asserts, music video is all about spectacle, so linear narrative gives way to a succession of visual codes, leading to the interweaving of genre conventions (such as performance, close ups of the star, some illustration of the lyrics) with spectacle that is cut to the beat. This meant a huge skills development for me as I sought to depart from the simple narrative structure of my comedy film opening, which was more or less a series of brief scenes with a voice over, music and titles punctuating the visuals, to an explosion of visual spectacle that should withstand repeated viewings.
Another challenge was creating a unified whole out of three different products: I had to incorporate visual elements of the music video into  the digipack design which in turn had to feature on the magazine advertisement in order for the three to work as a synergistic whole promoting the album.

Using Photoshop,  I designed the layout of the digipack and magazine advert, bearing in mind the need for clear visual codes, as I had learned from Roland Barthes.

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