Describe the ways in which your project work was aided by your use of digital technology and how your ability to use digital technology developed over time.
Throughout my time studying media at As and A level, My skills have developed especially with regards to using digital technology. This is especially obvious when looking at the progress made from my foundation portfolio to my advanced portfolio.
During my foundation portfolio I created was asked to create preliminary task. This required creating a short practice video including particular shots such as actions like walking through a door, shot reverse shot and over the shoulder shots filming a conversation. The digital technology I used in which to create this work started with the camera which was a Nikon D3200. Initially this taught me simply how to turn the camera on and how to use it to record video. It also helped with learning the different shots and how to hold the camera. After filming the required shots I then used a Mac computer upload and store the videos in order to edit them. The digital software I used to edit this video was I Movie which is a very simple from of editing software. This taught me how to cut videos and order them in a way best to suit the film. This software also taught me how to add music and simple titles to my video to achieve the desired affect. We then used the website youtube to distribute our preliminary task and uploaded it to our blog which is where we document the work that we have done.
For the main task in my foundation portfolio I was required to create a horror film opening. This once again required using the camera however since the preliminary task my camera skills had improved greatly allowing me to change the colour and light settings to achieve the desired look. In this I also used even more advanced shots and zooms to create a more realistic and complex film. This time the the digital technology used to edit the film was far more complex as it was Adobe Premier pro. This allowed me to cut the clips to even more precise points with the razor blade tool. I also learnt how to use the 'nest' tool to group different videos together in order to keep the required clips together once they had been cut to the right length. For the film opening I used the online website 'Royalty free music' to download the sounds and songs that I needed for my film opening. This program has a far more complex way of exporting the finished film however we learnt this quickly and uploaded our finished film to youtube once again. This form of editing software really helped stick to the conventions of horror films as it let us use fade to blacks and a fast pace to create an enigma code.
For my advanced portfolio we were asked to make an advertisement for which I decided to create a public awareness campaign. For the ancillary part we had to create a pop-up for a website and a radio advert. To create the pop up i used all of the technology in the studio to get the photographs for my pop up. I then uploaded them to the mac and edited them using photoshop by changing the levels and curves and cutting round the body of the model and creating a transparent background. I then used the shape tool to create my pop up and then interred the photograph. I then used web 2.0 to upload the finished pop up to my blog. For the radio advert I used sound recording technology which allowed me to directly upload the sounds to the mac ready for editing on premier pro.
