Digital Technology

“Digital technology turns media consumers into producers”. In your experience, how has your creativity developed through using digital technology to complete your coursework productions?  [25 marks]


From my first project, the thriller opening to my music video I have continued to use iMovie. This is the basic Mac software which was available to me and after making my thriller opening I got to grips with it. During the post production stage of my thriller opening, I didn't use that many of the effects because they weren't really needed as I captured everything through straight forward filming. Although for my music video, I used a lot more of the features, before I started editing the actual music video, I looked around the iMovie software to see what was available. I used the effects menu, colourisation and a hidden menu which I found when you drag a film clip onto the storyboard, overlaying another film clip. This gave me more options to enhance my music video and make it look a lot more professional. I upgraded the camera which I used, because I wanted better quality and more features. So instead of using a mini DV camera, I used a HD camera which was a lot higher quality and did have more functions on it, for example there were a lot more settings in manual mode and was easier to focus on specific objects, which I did use while filming some of the shots.


Making ancillary tasks was new to me, as I hadn't made them for the previous project so I planned what I wanted to use and create before I started anything. I had thought through so many ideas before I finally decided on the perfect one for my website and digipak. During the making of my website, I used a program called 'GIMP' which is an image manipulation software. I created all the separate icons, buttons, backgrounds and animations on this and saved them as separate files and then used a program called Serif PagePlus to assemble the website using layers. 
The internet was a big part of my website construction, because I needed to find a way to upload my website on to the internet so that it worked with an address for the bands website, so I used a free hosting site called 'Angel Cities'. It wasn't the best hosting site because there were adverts at the top which did disjoin my background layer and make it slightly pixelated, but it was free and looked one of the most reliable hosting sites.
For my digipak which was my second ancillary task which I created, I used 'GIMP' again to create everything on it, the logo, background, text layers, jack in the boxes and all the textures. I created all the textures from scratch because I didn't want to fringe copyright during the making of it and I also wanted a challenge. I created the whole digipak on this software and assembled it on here. I had to get the dimensions correct otherwise when I made the individual layers which I later added to it, the sizing wouldn't be right and wouldn't fit on the digipak. They would also look pixelated if they were the wrong shape or size. 
For both my website and digipak, I used 'Photoshop Lightroom 3' which is used for colourisation on images. These images were from a band photoshoot which I did and they were on the inside of my digipak and at the bottom of my website. 


For all three of my projects I have used blogger to create an online diary of what I had been doing in my planning, editing and final stages of my projects. I have used some software on my blogs which is from the internet to help me present my posts in creative ways. For example I have used, 'SlideShare' which has helped me to present my powerpoint slideshows with ease, 'Wordle' which has helped me to create a list of words, but in an interesting way to show creativity. It isn't just a list of words it puts the words at different angles and in different colours. I have also used, 'Youtube' which has allowed me to upload music videos which I have analysed and adapted ideas from, I have uploaded some creative responses in my evaluation using 'Youtube' and finally I used it to embed my music video into my blog. I integrated pictures into my blog, but I didn't use website such as 'Flickr' or 'Imageshack', I saved the picture or copied the URL to Blogger's picture uploader feature to embed them where I wanted on my blog posts.