Digital Technology

'Digital technology turns media consumers into media producers.' In your own experience, how has your creativity developed through using digital technology to complete your coursework productions?

From a young age I have always been a media consumer through peers and family. At the age of 17 being a sixth form student I started to develop into a media producer. Through my time in year 12 and 13 I created a film opening and also a music video.

Year 12 was a brand new experience for me as although I’ve grown up being a digital native I haven’t explored many different forms of technology. I developed my creativity in the very first few lessons as I was set the task of how to create a blog and upload video’s onto this very blog that was coursework related, I also analysed these videos in reference to camera, editing, mise en scene and sound. The blog was an effective method of presenting information on how I was learning and developing as a media student. I learnt how to put video’s on this blog through obtaining the embed code from YouTube and pasting it onto the blog.  Very soon after I got the hang of the blog I was developing further by using a brand new piece of software called ‘Premiere’.

Premiere was an effective editing software that allowed me to express myself and be creative with lots of different images, sounds and music. My first editing task was the ‘Dancing bears’ video. I think this developed my creativity as I was using a brand new software where I could play around with different effects to what I thought was best suited. The effects I used were straight forward cuts and wipes as I was unaware of any other types, I also had to speed up and slow down certain aspects of the video to make it look professional.

Shortly after this task I was given the opportunity to grab hold of a camera and film in my Juno task. This was an effective task as I could put together what I learnt from premiere and the skills I was learning from filming. As camera-man I was creative in the number of shots I was taking. This would give me inspiration for the upcoming prelim where I would get a real taste of making a storyboard, planning creating a script and uploading a final version onto YouTube. In my Prelim task I began to explore more effects on Premiere such as additive dissolve and fade to black which shows a development from my previous tasks. My other group members also used Photoshop to create a newspaper article which was another software that wasn’t used previously. This developed my creativity as I had to start a script by scratch with my team members for our given genre and research other types of openings with the genre to get ideas. My genre was urban teen drama so I watched a number of these on YouTube to gain some knowledge of the character images and environments.

In A2 there was a big step up in the number of technologies used. I used a brand new programme to create a website called Wix. In the creation of the website I had to arrange around a number of sections of a blank page and add appropriate colours to our bands image. I also used a social media gadget bar to allow people browsing our website to direct to our Youtube page, twitter page and Facebook. Vista print was another website I used to enhance my website as It enabled me to add our bands logo to a number of different products such as a hoody, bag t shirt and phone case.