Digital Technology Essay

Describe and evaluate your skills development in digital technology from AS to A2

From AS to A2 it is evident that my skills as an individual have significantly improved in the use of digital technology. This is due to my increasing confidence and also development of technology within the industry and what is available to us at school. At AS I produced a two minute opening of an indie/alternative film and have carried this through to A2, creating a promo music video of the same genre.

At AS for my film opening the cameras we had avaliable to us were Sony video cameras with DV tapes. These cameras had a long battery life which was a significant advantage when shooting on location - for our group in a sweet shop. One of the main disadvantages of these cameras were that the footage produced was quite "grainy" and I personally believe this made some of the shots look unprofessional - for example our second shot, a panning shot of sweet jars, looked dull and it was for this reason that the majority of our film was recorded on the Flip cameras. The Flip cameras are HD and this enabled us to obtain much clearer and colourful shots. We also used the camera for the opening shot which was a panning down of a building. It produced a clear and professional opening. Moreover, the Flip camera has a much more efficient uploading system - a simple USB port, which saved time as uploading the footage from the Sony camera involved using a firewire which took a significant amount of time to upload to the computer.

At A2, we have now been given Panasonic HD SD90 video cameras which I believe has massively contributed to my development in digital technology. The Panasonic cameras produce much higher quality footage that looks clear, clean and professional. The option of uploading the footage through a USB lead is possible however, the cameras have an SD card in the bottom which is a much faster way of uploading our footage. We filmed our whole music video on these Panasonic cameras and solely used the Flip for documenting our filming and progress.

This year, I have also used the growing popularity of social networking sites to my advantage. In AS, for audience feedback, we had to arrange to meet up with people to either record their feedback and opinons or take a written record. However, this year at A2 I used my Facebook and Twitter account to do this. Using these sites meant I was able to log on as and when I wished and could quickly obtain responses as there was always someone logged on to respond. For my digipak, I uploaded five possible front covers and got friends to comment and "like" the picture they thought were best. As a group we also created a Twitter account for our band "Hunt The Noise" where we posted "tweets" asking "fans" for their opinions on music video ideas.

Focusing more on the digipak, another development in digital technology this year was my use of Adobe Photoshop. Last year for AS I didn't get the chance to use this software as the coursework did not require any still images that I could edit however this year I used it to edit photos for the front, inside left, inside right/CD and back cover of my digipak. Photoshop enabled me to use the transparency tool to put an image on the CD that was different to the image the CD was placed on. The software also allowed me to change the colouring of images, add text and create a boreder. I also used Youtube tutorials to teach myself more complex tools within the photo editing programme which can be argued as independent research.

Last year for AS, the editing of our film opening was basic, having only just learnt how to use iMovie 09 on the iMAC computers. However, we also kept it basic due to the fact it was a filming opening and of the genre "alternative/comedy". The conventions of our genre didn't contain transitions, special effects and so on but this however was applicable to the genre of "indie/alternative/house" for our A2 music video. Moreover, this year we have also paid attention to the colour grading of our footage. We played around with the saturation and 'exposure' of the clips to create the muted colours we thought would fit our music video. We also used Final Cut Pro this year for our production. This software had been newly installed and we used Youtube tutorials (another development in my digital technology) to teach ourselves to use green screen and split screen which was another convention in our genre of music video.

Another development in digital technology this year at A2 was my increased used of the tripod. This hardware enable extremely steady, smooth and professional shots. At AS the majority of our shots were freehand, for example the shots of our main character dancing. However this year we have taken advantage of the simple yet effective equipment and utilisted it well. For example, our establishing shots in our music video look exceptionally professional and as a group we were very pleased with them.

This year at A2, I have also developed my digital technology in that I have used Excel to create graphs and tables recording audience feedback and shooting schedules.

To conclude, it is evident that my skills in digital technology have dramatically developed since AS to A2 through development in the hardware avaliable to us, the software we have and my confidence within the course. The result of this is a more professional piece of coursework.