Tuesday 27 March 2012

Practice Essay - Section A 1a: How has digital technology impacted on your creative decision making?

Throughout the course of two years I think my skills have developed in digital technology, influencing my creative decision making. For my AS project I had to create a music magazine and for A2 my skills were developed by having to create a teaser trailer, film poster and film magazine front cover. I will firstly talk about my AS project and then how my skills developed and improved through A2.

For both projects I used different mediums and forms of digital technology.
Using Photoshop and InDesign predominantly for AS, I was developing an understanding on how to operate and work on the programs. There was limited possibilities for this project. The shot type for the preliminary task was very specific, having to be a MCU. This meant that my creativity for this cover was limited. However, for the main task, the music magazine, I was able to choose my own genre of music and to have different shot types. When taking the photos I knew how I wanted to edit them, from looking at existing music magazines like NME and Spin I saw how they used the images to convey the different genre's and wanted to portray that into my own. For the DPS in the exisiting magazines they all had one big image taking over most of the spread so I wanted to challenge the normal conventions of music magazines by including another three images in the spread. Using Photoshop and InDesign I was able to create the effect I was after.
For the double page spread I used a series of black and white shots edited in InDesign, after looking at my double page spread as a whole I thought that if those three images were in black and white it would stand out against the main image on the other side. Manipulating the images in Photoshop was difficult for me at the beginning of the task, I was not familiar with Photoshop before then so I did not know what all the effects meant, so with help of my teacher, other students and even Internet tutorials I navigated my way through to get the best effects on my images.
For A2 my skills had developed, I felt like my photographic skills using Photoshop had improved from AS. I knew how to use effects like the Hue and Saturation to enhance the colour on the image. On InDesign I was able to use the program more efficiently, less time needed to try and work how it came together. Font work was a big part for both projects, with the AS magazine I needed to get the right font to portray the right genre of the music magazine, and the same with A2. The film poster showed my creativity in creating an image from scratch and taking inspirations from other film posters to create my own on for my own teaser trailer. A big influence on my poster was the Shutter Island poster, I loved the way there was red writing standing out against the dark image, the effect on the image looked great, almost black and white so I really wanted to convey something very similar in my own poster. Again with the fonts I knew by A2 what would work for a magazine and adapted those skills to a poster. Through pre-production in A2 I had to use the Internet for a great deal of it, researching into diferent trailers trying to get inspiration. The trailer I liked the most was Transformers 3, it was very inpsirational music and suspense wise, theway that it built tension just through the dipping and music was what I wanted in my own trailer. Using sites like YouTube and IMDb helped with my creativity because it was moving images as opposed to just a magazine front cover like in AS so I was able to invisage what I wanted the final trailer to be like.
At A2 since our task was to make a teaser trailer we had to use more technology than at AS. The main source I used was Premier Pro. At first this was very difficult because I did not know how to work it, but with help from my teacher and using Internet tutorials I was able to make the trailer come together quite well. My creativity came to use here as I needed to edit out bits of the trailer that we weren't going to use in the final cut. By doing this and using our storyboard we condensed the material down into what we wanted and what we thought worked best. By the end of the project I was confident in my abilities to work on Premier Pro. Post-production tasks like editing and doing the evaluation enabled me to use much more digital technology than at AS. Programs like SoundBooth helped make the process of getting the music to how we wanted for the trailer was a great help, as we could enhance the sound or make it quieter depending on the suspense and tension that was building in the trailer. Using cameras and voice recorders to try and think outside of the box for our evaluation, creating a running commentary over our trailer for one of the questions showed our creative side whilst using different mediums of technology.

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