Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contribute to your creative decision making, refer to e.g’s.

From the start of my coursework in my AS music magazine to the end of my A2 music video I found my skills ever advancing as I used different digital technologies. Having a wider knowledge of skills to use was important in the production of media texts, especially in the production of my music video. As my skills developed I could create more vivid ideas, and pay attention to more intricate details.

When I set about making my AS music magazine, I started by making a prelim, this gave me the chance to enhance my Photoshop skills, it was incredibly useful doing this because quite frankly my prelim magazine was appalling, but having had a go with Photoshop, I continued to practice and develop my skills on the programme. Once my skills were at a good enough standard it allowed me to create ideas based around my capabilities on the programme, whilst previously I had only a brief understanding of photoshop, my ideas were very limited. When making my prelim I was also very naive to the idea of media theorists, but soon applied Goodwin’s star image theory to my final magazine and of course used it in my music video.

In my video, like with my magazine, I was thrown in at the deep end with the lack of knowledge I had on the computer using iMovie. But after making an animatic storyboard and my first draft, I rapidly enhanced my skills with the digital technology, after my first draft of my music video I was lacking a lot of movement in my video. This is a key convention in the indie rock genre I was using. So after playing around on iMovie I came across the ken burns cropping tool, this adding added movement to each of my shots which hadn’t been captured simply on camera. If I hadn’t developed my draft video into my final video I would have firstly had a much different video, and secondly a much different mark. It also made filming easier, when I refilmed I did not have time to wave the camera around to get an extra element of movement so having the ken burns tool on the iMac when I uploaded my footage made making the video a great deal easier. Being able to zoom in, also allowed me to focus on the front man, again making use of Andrew Goodwin’s star image theory. When I filmed my footage I also made sure that I captured a variety of different camera angles, because when my video was finished it was meant to be a fast paced indie rock video, and fast pace cuts to different angles were key for this.

Developing my skills with digital technology helped me with no end of decisions in the production and creation of all of my media products. I was effectively limited in my decision making by what I was capable of doing on the computer, and my whole spectrum of ideas increased as my capabilities using different media technologies increased. At first I had no idea how to use photoshop in the slightest, but after picking it up, became much more comfortable using the programme, and felt like I would not struggle putting any of my ideas into action.