digital technology essay 1st draft

I began year 12 with a basic understanding of editing software and my initial knowledge was limited to programs such as windows movie maker. This type of software was not professional and limited creativity. Coming into year 12 I had never used premiere pro. One of the first tasks completed in year 12 was a basic editing task where we combined clips of dancing animals. This task enabled us to begin to learn that basics such as importing clips of videos and mp3 to go with the videos. We also altered and cropped the length of videos. This task did not really allow for any creative input and was simply to get us used to a new software.

We also practiced editing with our preliminary task copying an opening sequence of Juno. This enabled us to practice our editing skills further as we had to match the narrative and put the clips in order. That was later an effective tool for our film opening as collectively throughout the tasks we got more familiar with the software. Upon creating our film opening I was still unfamiliar with many aspects of premiere pro. Through trial and error of editing our film opening was created using tools such as effects for black and white, straight cuts for the scenes in order to keep the editing continuous. 

 Something which I can now look back on is how the editing was of poor quality something which could have been improved on would have been how smooth the editing appeared to the audience and how the effects were used for transition. The black and white effect used could have been editing further to appear grainy to further highlight the flashbacks. The sound quality is poor and could have been changed as well as this now I have more experience with premiere pro our film opening could have been editing with colour correction to make it look better quality.

In year 13 we used that same editing software which I had familiarised myself with in year 12. Upon completing another preliminary task, I found YouTube was a great source to learn new editing skills. I used YouTube to learn new skills, manipulating the colour to match the music video we were copying. This was useful as it allowed me to be more creative with my editing in comparison to editing a film opening. The quality of editing can be recognised throughout all of our editing tasks as our experience and knowledge broadened. When editing our final music video a variety of effects were used to change the colour, we used matte track key, qaussian blur, brightness and contrast, warp stabilizer and many others to make our music video looks as professional as possible. We also used skills initially learnt in year 12 such as ordering our clips to create a narrative, slowing down the video and making them faster to ensure of lip sync matched. All of our editing skills throughout year 12 and 13 have combined and contributed so that I could create the best possible outcome for our final music video, all the skills learnt were useful in allowing me to recognise what effects and edits match my target genre of video and how to use the tools to my advantage to make my video aesthetically pleasing to my audience.

Presentational software was a large contributor throughout both years as it allowed us to plan, research and evaluate and then represent what we found.

In year 12 my use of presentation software was very basic, and was limited to emaze, slide share and PowerPoint these were much less advanced in comparison to the software I used in year 13. The software’s were very basic and many of the layouts used were a pre-set template, although this made creating a presentation quick and easy it was less creative and less aesthetically pleasing and was simply created to present the information. In year 13 I explored more ways to present my work using new presentation tools such as prezi, visme and also create videos and screen casts. Screen casts were great to help develop my work in detail as it allowed me to talk over the thing I was presenting. Screen casts and videos also meant that my presentations were more personal and in much more depth allowing the audience to fully understand the points which I was making. It can be seen throughout year 12 and 13 that my presenting skills have adapted to be more advanced as I investigated new ways to show my work. This has contributed to my media production outcomes as it has allowed me to research, plan and evaluate my worth in much more depth with further analysis.

In year 12 I mainly used YouTube to upload editing tasks and my preliminary task as well as my film opening so that I could later add the links to my blog and make it accessible to the rest of my group as well as friends and family and other peers so that we could get feedback. I recognise now that this was not an efficient use of all the things which I could have taken advantage of from YouTube. In year 13 YouTube played a much larger par in my research and planning of creating a music video.  I used  YouTube to find a song which didn’t already have a music video I was able to take inspiration from other music videos as well as from other student videos for when I was planning my music videos sequence. For planning aspects of our music video, we created stealomatics where to took clips from YouTube and put them together. Similarly, as in year 12 I also used YouTube in year 13 to upload y videos so I could then add the link to my blog, it also made the video assessable to the rest of my group and like in year 12 made it easy to gain feedback as it was online anyone could watch it at their convenience.

The camera used in year 12 was a school camera. It was of much lower video quality in comparison to the camera used in year 13.  We used a ….. in year 12 to film our film opening. We also used an iPhone to take photos for our film poster and found that the quality of the image on iPhone was much better than using the camera which we had access to from school. In year 13 we had access to a much better camera we used a cannon….. to film our music video and also to take photos from our photoshoot which were used for our print work we also used the cannon…. To film our artists interview, the digital technology used from year 12 to 13 was of a much higher standard and has contributed to our media products as the quality can be seen to improve making the videography and photography look more professional.

The software’s used in year 12 to create our print work were of a much less professional standard I used tools such as PowerPoint and word to create our film opening poster the outcome although looked like film opening poster was of much lower quality in comparison to if I had, had the skills I have now to use Photoshop. The images used were pixelated and although represented our film opening well could have been created to appear more synergetic with the rest of our products. In year 13 I worked hard to ensure all ancillary texts and our music video was portrayed as one product with the synergy used. For this I used Photoshop to create a digipak, poster, digipak advert and tour poster.  The images used throughout showed a strong synergetic comparison and can be viewed at a high standard as the program used created a more professional finish. We used Photoshop to ensure all fonts, colours and sizes matched throughout our products. Our digital technology use can be seen to develop throughout our print work from year 12 to 13 as the standards can be seen to improve this has contributed to our media products making them more aesthetic and improving the quality of our work.

I used wix to create a website in year 12 however I used a pre-set template which was a basic layout there was no synergy with the rest of my music video or poster and the website did not have many pages, the website was not specific to the film opening as I didn’t know how to change it.  My digital technology skills had developed in year 13 as when creating a website for our music video although I still used wix I developed my own layout and adapted pages in order to suit my target brand and artist image and to also include multiples pages of information about my artist and her music. Our website was created to match our synergy, it was created overtime and was continuously added to so signify our artist. The website appeared more advance and professional in comparison to the way our website looked.

Blogger was a large part of digital software which was used throughout both year 12 and 13 to keep track of our work and for our work to be accessible for our teacher’s peers and examiners. In year 12 I was getting used to using blogged to upload posts although it was a simple layout I realise now I have more experience that I didn’t fully take advantage of all the gadgets which could be added to make my blog easier to navigate. In year 13 I recognised and had come to terms with blogger from my year 12 coursework I now acknowledge how the online resource made it easily accessible from anyway so that I could keep on top f my work and upload frequently after becoming more familiar with blogger I was able to make my year 13 blog more convenient and also matched its synergy with the artist I was creating and the music video construction I made. In comparison to my year 12 blog my year 13 blogger was much more organised and presented in a more mature aesthetic way.  

Throughout year 12 and 13 my digital technology work can be recognised to improve and develop over time this has contributed to my media products out come as they can be viewed to be more polished and developed with a more professional finish.