In the last two years of studying media
studies, digital technology has been a huge influence on my media production in
both years 12 at AS when I produced a teen horror film opening and 13 at A2
when I created a promotional music video along with a music magazine
advertisement and CD digipak. Individual technologies have had large impacts on
my work, and over the course of the two years I have learned more and more
about each of them which in turn has enabled me to produce higher quality of
products with a collective use of particular technologies.
Before the start of the course in year 12 I had
previously had zero experience with editing software. Due to this, we crated a
preliminary task whereby we created a sequence that led to two characters
telling a ‘knock knock’ joke. For this, I used iMovie to edit the footage that
I had gathered. This piece of particular software was rather basic, but that
was in fact the intention, so that I could become familiar with the basics of
editing effect and transitions. When moving to the production of my film
opening I moved to a more improved and technologically advanced software called
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. This step up from the two programs allowed me to
improve the quality of my work by allowing us to add more complex effects and
sharper cuts. However, we were in a group and therefore I had a limited amount
of control over the editing process and didn’t learn as much I would have liked
to. In A2, I was still using APP but for this project I was working
individually and therefore had complete control over the editing and therefore
I could learn and use the effects that I wanted, improving my skills in this
area of digital technology, for example, altering the speed of a clip.
Further to this, I have had the chance to use
Web 2.0. This is the term used to describe a second generation of the World
Wide Web that is focused on the ability for people to collaborate and share
information online. Before my AS course, I had little experience in this, only
using social media such as Facebook and Twitter – I didn’t even have a YouTube
channel! In year 12, I used Blogger as a way of publishing my research and
planning. This type of website and blogging tool was vital for my production
process as I was able to get feedback on my work so that I could improve it. I
had had no previous experience in blogging prior to AS so my skills had
improved dramatically from zero to just this basic level. At A2 I stepped it up
a gear and had a blog that was much more media rich, embedding videos and articles
from external sources as well as my own. With out a tool like blogger, this
would have been increasingly more difficult to keep a hold of all my research
and planning in a place where I could view it but also get feedback without
having to transfer it anywhere else. The step from pre-A-Level to AS was large
but from there to A2 was substantially bigger. This step did therefore allow me
to produce a more professional looking product in my second year due to this
digital technology.
My camera equipment is another example of the
digital technology that I not only used in my journey through A-Level Media
Studies, but also an example of the progression I have had over the two years. In my preliminary task we filmed using the school's apple iPads. These were extremely low quality but for the product we were creating we did not need big, heavy pieces of equipment. In our main AS production, where we created a film opening, we moved to the smaller camcorders (Canon Legira). These were of reasonable quality and were extremely easy to use, making them very useful as a piece of digital technology in my work. In A2, I moved on even further by using a DSLR camera (Canon EOS 1100D). This camera was of incredible quality, leaving me with extremely steady shots and enabling me to alter the focus to cater for my needs. This digital technology was arguably the most important to get right and thankfully for me, I did, leaving me with a better quality product in the final product than in my preliminary task.
