Describe the ways in which you developed your skills in the use of technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative decision-making.

In my AS coursework I created a preliminary magazine, Mercardo, and a punk music magazine, Rebel. In A2 I created a preliminary music video to Busted's What I Go To School For, a music video to OneRepublic's Good Life and a digipak and poster for the fake band The Empty Crowd.

I had no previous experience of using platforms like Blogger, Scribd, Animoto or Slideshare to present my work. To begin with my presentation of research and planning work was rather limited this reduced my creativity. However when I expanded my knowledge of this digital technology I was able to present my work with more creativity, incorporating links, videos. pictures and gifs into my blog posts and to enhance my coursework blog to set the mood which linked to the punk genre of my music video. Once I had established the research and planning through the use of digital technology I was able to advance my creativity when creating my music magazine. Photoshop was my main tool when creating my music magazine, for the preliminary magazine and the draft I created a basic quality product because I was not completely familiar with the various tools and editing techniques I could achieve in Photoshop. For example I relied on basic pre-programmed patterns to fill the background, this did not create an effective, professional look, which I had to develop for my final music magazine. In order to do this I experimented with the cut-out tool using my own pictures to create a collage effect which I used as the background for my front cover and double page spread. This allowed me to be more creativity and produce a more original style than using Photoshop basic patterns. As I wanted to create an artsy magazine to fit with the DIY aspect of punk and inspired by street artists like Banksy, I experimented with the filter effects in Photoshop to create a stencil print look to the photographs on the front cover and the double page spread. This linked to the art style and linked to the band, Loaded Guns, which featured in the article. Having used the filter effects in the draft magazine I was able to identify which techniques where more successful and produce a more creative, effective final product.

My skills with photoshop then developed from AS to A2, being already familiar with what techniques are more effective than others I was able to produce a creative outcome quicker. However the change of art style from punk to pop changed the way I had to approach the product. Having created a concept for The Empty Crowd which had to link from digipak, poster and music video, I decided to use location shots from the music video to anchor the concept in the digipak. The concept was city vs country so I wanted to portray the contrast between the two. Photoshop's layout of layers enabled me to create a layering effect of photographs of the country projected onto the photographs of the city. This layered effect was developed for my draft digipak, although a more advanced use of photoshop than my AS product it was not as successful as it could have been because the layering obscured the locations too much. I then changed the idea to a simpler layout editing the photographs individually to highlight the contrast between the two locations and to link to the style of the video, where the city shots were edited into black and white and the country was in colour.

My film-making skills have improved over time, through the use of digital technology and understand the technology better which has allowed me to be more creative, producing a more effective product. For the preliminary film, we used basic hand-held video cameras this had a restricted quality which effected the quality of the end product. Also only having very basic knowledge of editing programs meant that the preliminary video and music video draft was not very successful. Having only ever made videos using pictures on Windows Movie Maker I found it difficult to edit videos, altering the audio and cutting out shots, to match the music with the action. As Windows Movie Maker only has limited editing effects which look very unprofessional, we decided to use Adobe Premier Elements for the final music video. This gave more options in editing the shots, increasing speed, slowing action down, increasing or decreasing the brightness to create a strong contrast between the country and city shots. Also the variety of effects allowed us to experiment and be inspired by possible effects. For example, in the animatic there was not plan to include double speed or slow motion shots however after experimenting with this effect we decided it looked more interesting and creative with this edit. As professional pop music videos also use editing techniques like this to create effect and to match the pace of the music it fitted really well.

Overall, I think I have been able to develop my skills with digital technology over AS and A2, having better skills with the technology has in turn has contributed to my creativity. Through experimenting on the programs, mainly Adobe Photoshop and Premier Elements, I have been able to see what I can effectively achieve and what is not as successful. I think I progressed the most with Photoshop as I had very little understanding of how the program works and what I could create at the beginning of the course whereas now I have a good understanding of what effects and tools work best to enhance photographs and create a media product. This has helped my creativity as well as I am now aware of what my skills are in this programs.