Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

I will discuss how my skills in using digital technology contributed to my creative decision making from my foundation portfolio, a 2 minute thriller film opening to my advanced portfolio, in which we created a music video.

Final cut was the main programme, digital technology; we used to create both our advanced portfolio and my foundation portfolio. For our foundation portfolio we used the colour corrector to de saturate the colour of some of our shots, or enhance a specific colour within that shot. We chose to do this because we wanted to create a tense and thriller specific atmosphere to fit in with the conventions of our chosen genre, psychological thriller. In our advanced portfolio we used the colour corrector to enhance the feeling of the song in our music video; we added a sepia tone to the video as this linked with the lyrics of the song. We also brightened some specific shots because we felt this would enhance the genre and the character of our artist, which was very important to us, as appealed to our target audience.
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]-->
<!--[endif]-->

Photoshop was another piece of software we used in both advanced and foundation portfolio. During the making of our thriller film opening we decided to make a film poster to attract our target audience. Using a picture we had taken at one our shoots if the torture scene, which was also a shot in our film opening, we used photoshop to edit the picture and give it a sinister look to capture the genre of our opening. To do this we brightened up the main aspect of the picture, which was the victim, and darkened the background around him, and then we used bold white writing for the title and description. This allowed us to develop basic skills in photoshop which we could then advance further in our A2 production. The use of photoshop in the advanced portfolio was much greater than in the foundation portfolio as we had to use this software to create our ancillary tasks, digipak and a magazine advert. As we were already familiar with photoshop it made it easier to make our digipak in our A2 production. We started by using the basic tools we knew how to use from our AS production, we wanted our artist to be portrayed as an environmentally friendly person so we used the saturation to draw on that aspect. We increased the saturation to enhance the colour of the natural scenery around emphasis the environment around him; we also tried to use natural looking colours to reiterate the natural environment when deciding on our text colour. We made two different front and back covers for our digipak, this allowed us to develop our photoshop skills further and helped us in making our creative decisions, in which digipak portrayed our artist how we wanted him to be seen. We used the blur effect on the background of the picture of our digipak to make the legs of our artist and the guitar, stand out against the fence background, we also used the cut out tool to put an effect on the whole image. This represented the image we wanted for our artist as it showed him as an environmentally friendly person.

Web 2.0 was also very useful in our creative decision making as it allowed gaining feedback of various productions created using the photoshop and final cut software. For example once we had got a rough cut of our music video we were then able to upload it to Facebook and YouTube so others were able to see it and give us feedback which we could then use when creating our final cut of the video. We did not do this with our AS thriller opening sequence, we only uploaded it to YouTube for feedback, and had some of our peers to view it in school. Using new social networking sites made our creative decision making easier and more representative of our target audience. In our AS production we used blogger to document the whole of our production which proved to be useful as we were able to see the process of our production. We developed this skill in our A2 production because we were able to see what we should have done in terms of research and planning.

Overall, digital technology was a vital factor in allowing us to make good creative decisions in our A2 and AS productions as well as making our productions effective.