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.

The advancement of digital technology made allowed me license to be creative and my skills were able to develop as the transition in quality of my foundation portfolio with my short thriller opening to my advanced portfolio of a music video.

to begin with my skill with editing software was not great so the initial programme I used to create my reconstruction of the good, the bad and the ugly using Imovie. By the end of that preliminary task we were encouraged to use Final Cut Express and this became the prominent programme for my foundation and advanced portfolio. In the infancy of our foundation work it was difficult to use final cut as I was not familiar with using a Mac so it made it difficult to get the programme to do to cut the footage from the first task of 'The accident as it shows with the rough transitions between shots and lack of attention to continuity. As we embarked on more tasks the use of final cut became easier as familiarity with the tools made it easier to make a better quality of work; this was shown in our preliminary task when we used the razor tool so that we could time the cuts precisely so that we could apply continuity correctly. In my thriller opening we were able to distort the levels on the soundtrack so that we could drop the score when the characters were talking and bring in the instruments for the chase scene. This helped our development as our initial feedback from our rough cut was the soundtrack needed work and the colour needed to altered. Final cut express allowed us to develop our product further for a successful final film.

After the success and confidence which we developed from our foundation portfolio this skill allowed us to develop how we could create a successful product for our music video. With the basic to moderate tools now mastered we began to try more creative and use the advance tools of layering amongst others so as to use Final cut to its full potential. The use of the layer tool was useful in portraying the relationship between the lyrics and visuals by slowing down one version of a shot so it created and delayed blur effect to display the drunken state the artist was in. This received positive reception from our target audience as it helped us to replicate the desired reaction in us and our audience.

In our advanced portfolio we had to complete ancillary tasks which required a new arsenal of skills. for these tasks we were required two out of three of the following : a digipack a magazine advert and a webpage; we decided to to create a digipack and a magazine advert. As previous experience with the following software we decided that Photoshop would  be an appropriate programme; as it delivers a professional finish  we decided it would give our products the highest standard of finish. As a intricate and temperamental programme it is difficult to use on a PC which i am use to it became a much of challenging task when the majority of the editing of photos was done on a Mac. The use of online tutorials online helped me get to grips with the various tools. This was useful as we were able to created spotlight effect on our  images so we could raise the level of brightness on a certain part of an image without distorting the overall colour; this was key to the editing of our digipack as we were able to bring to focus our artists face and torso on a plain background and give the picture character.

Though i had previous experience with with the software Photoshop in there were still a few problems. Learning to use the magic wand tool to highlight parts of the photo due to its AI it would select and deselect parts of the photo at will and would compromise the edit of the rest of the development. Even though we did incur problems the produced products from Photoshop were a vast improvement on previous notable works from our foundation portfolio; this is when we designed a film poster and due to our lack of experience the only tools we could use competently were the feather and free transform which lead us to simply darkening the background and adding basic text. By the time we presented our advance portfolio with our artist poster we were able to use the feather to blend colours, the spotlight effect to draw focus and self installed texts to grab the audience. This overall gave our work a more professional look and would be real of existing media products.

Another form of technology that we used was our cameras. We shot both our foundation and advanced portfolio in high-definition;this was after we recieved feedback that our  first  attempt of the film opening on the foundation portfolio that the picture quality was not great for the kingpin scene as the room was too dark and the chase scene looked "grainy". We felt that the cameras helped us to increase the quality of our work and the camera was easy to use, clear in quality in picking up footage and sound; the sound quaility was helped by our use of the microphone as during the scenes outside for our foundation product it was initially hard to hear the voice of the henchmen over the wind. We felt that these cameras that we used were appropriate as opposed to non-HD cameras as most films are now shot in HD for a better finish.

Web 2.0 was integral in our course in decision making, as it allowed us to promote and gain feedback from our target audience in mass population. We found that asking people to watch our video wasn't enough, and we needed a new approach to bring in an audience. We devised a plan to get a viral buzz going for our product using various platforms so that the videos could be spread. The best way to do this was to post our videos to a numerous amount of social networking sites through YouTube in order to gain feedback and publicity. For our advanced portfolio, we regularly uploaded our music video to YouTube a numerous amount of times as a work in progress to easily post through sites such as Twitter and Facebook in order to receive feedback to make our final product even better. However, during our foundation portfolio it has to be said that we didn't utilise our possession of Web 2.0; the main form of promotion was using trends on twitter by hashtagging evasion to try and get people talking about it. As we weren't fully aware of it's capabilities and heavily relied on questionnaires and small scale feedback from close peers.
Overall, my group and I feel that our experience in using digital technology has vastly improved in making creative decisions as we all feel that our advanced portfolio is better than our foundation portfolio simply due to our experience and knowledge of how to utilise the programmes that we were able to use.