Digital Technology

A “Digital technology turns media consumers into producers". In your own experience, how was your creativity developed through using digital technology to complete your coursework productions.
'What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds " Steve Jobs , I agree with this statement although not entirely ,technology allows to enhance and project our ideas, it gives us options that we may not have originally thought of but it does not choose the decisions of making what to create and how to feature a product. The use of technology has helped to improve my media production as i knew more about the technology it gave me more ideas and has help to widely improve my creativity and professionalism from the preliminary task in as to my music video at A2.
In the thriller opening we used Imovie, YouTube and audacity. We used Imovie to edit the film which was good as we learnt basic editing skills and developed skills such as colourisation. We used YouTube and social networking sites to browse artists for a suitable track to put along side our thriller opening after researching many thriller films such as se7en and Layer Cake. We also researched into the director Alfred Hitchcock in as he is key to the thriller genre. This helped us gain suitable music, ideas and conventions. Once we had found a suitable track we then used iTunes to download this track when we then used audacity to manipulate the track and this enabled us to cut the music to the right length and repeat and edit parts of the song we wanted to use more.
From the Thriller opening to the music video we now have learnt to incorporate a lot more digital technology and have used it for research and as a tool going from three types of technology to 12.
Research into music videos allowed me to develop my work much further because it was more specific to the genre than in my AS work. The target audience for the thriller Genre was a lot broader than the target audience for the music genre which allowed us to make a more specific project to the audience and develop our work and ideas further.
We used many more active features of the blog this year aswell. Using it in the thriller opening we used it to document our research such as Alfred Hitchcock but it was mainly writing an not as ict efficient. After experience of using Digital technology we now have used allot more digital packages within the blog such as wordle,slideshare,flickr,image shack and youtube . All used to embed stage of our process. The blog also seemed a lot more of an online diary of every part of the process to make it easy to relate to and go back to pick parts to edit and go back to .
The editing was also a lot more advanced although we used music in our thriller openings the music and edit cuts may not have been as synched with beats but from experience of doing this it was easier to have an ear for the musical timing which was key for the music video as the video represent the music is many aspects. We also learn to synchronise visuals with the music such as lip synching or instrumental playing. We looked to using new technologies for split screen but were restricted as we had limited finds and could not find any free processes that allowed us to do this.
In our ancillary tasks we had to keep continuity over the three products which was a new skill we had to adapt research into products such as cd covers and websites allowed us to pick 2 appropriate media form out of the three which was most suitable for our target audience , in which we had learnt to research via internet using a website called bandzoogle which allowed us to gain the importance of features in a webpage such as the ‘header’ and ‘social networking links’.
The filming has also come along way we were able to film a lot more in our music video than our thriller film due to more effective time management and planning on the blog which meant that we went from filming about 15 mins worth in the thriller opening for a 2 minutes film we filmed an hour of constant filming which allowed us to have a lot more to choose from and have a more professional cut to what was included and not.
“The proper artistic response to digital technology is to embrace it as anew window on everything that’s eternally human, and to use it with passion, wisdom, fearlessness and joy”. (Ralph Lombreglia). I think Digital technology and learning more about concepts about how to use it and watching other example can help to improve media in general and has especially helped me to improve from As to A2.