Essay A1 D&T

In your experience, how has your creativity developed through using digital technology to complete your productions?

Across the last two years I have made for my AS level coursework a spy spoof film opening named, ‘New kid on the block’ that showed the story of these two spies who couldn’t be more different, one posh and professional woman and the other an immature and unaware little boy. For my A2 coursework I create a music video named ‘Devil side’ and through this story I highlighted abusive relationships and issues of feeling trapped in them.

When creating parts of my AS coursework I used digital technology in order to create the posters, however at the time I used paint and PowerPoint to make this poster as it was a quick and easy way to do so. Although when making this I realised my options were limited and I was unable to make it look fully professional. For the posters used in my A2 coursework I was able to get to grips with Photoshop instead, which allowed me to venture out more on the posters and make a more original and professional outcome. For example, I used the ‘magic wand tool’ to create accurate cuts and put my artists in locations she was never in. At the start Photoshop was difficult to understand and use, however using YouTube helped a lot as I was able to look up all the techniques and ways to do certain things. Such as using the ‘healing brush tool’ which made any bad parts of the image automatically better and of a higher quality. This was used on my artists when the images were of a lower quality but still worth saving and using in our end result.

When filming my AS film I used the schools normal HD Camera, the quality of the camera I used was good but I was limited on what I could do with it. I then used the footage and put it onto Adobe Premiere where I began to edit and put it all together. I used basic tools such as ‘cut’ and ‘Ripple Edit tool’ as my knowledge of Premier was still little and my confidence was not great. I found sticking to the safe options got me through the editing process but held me back in places where I could have made the film better. Although I was able to again use YouTube to help me create certain desired effects such as a binocular effect. This was created by importing an image of two circles put together and cutting out the inside of them. After that all that was needed was to put the image on top of the video in order for it to look like you’re looking through binoculars from a first person’s view. In my A2 Music video I was able to develop my camera knowledge and ability and use a Canon Digital SLR – Manual Focusing camera so that I could get better shots and film footage overall. Using the manual focus allowed me to blur out any unnecessary backgrounds and have the camera only focusing on the artist. When editing this on Adobe Premier I used more complex tools such as ‘Colour corrector’ in order to change the colour and tone of certain footage. This was used when the desired scenery was not available for the happy scenes, which meant I had to edit the footage to a brighter and happier colour so that the emotions could clearly be shown. I also used the ‘Overlapping’ tools so that I could have more than one image happening at a time. This would normally be used when the artists signing image is flipping in-between the narrative. We did this so that it could give a clear indication to the audience that the artist was related to the narrative story.

In order to present the ideas of my coursework I used programs such as Emaze. This was an easy and simple way to present my ideas of all the work I had done, it allowed me to get all my ideas into a selection of slides and present it elegantly. However, as time went on I was able to use other programs such as Prezie. Prezie allowed me to convey my work using interactive materials making it more enjoyable to watch. This also allowed my products to look more aesthetically pleasing and more welcoming to all types of audiences. Overall my knowledge on digital technology has developed massively and over the course of two years I am now capable of using a number of different programs that I was not able to use at the start.