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.

In Year 12 for my AS Production I was given the task to create a 2 minute opening to a film. Our group chose the Thriller genre. In year 13 for my A2 production I was given the task to create a music video for a song of our choice, along with a website for the band and a digipack. Our group chose the Punk Rock genre for this production. Before beginning any work on productions it was important that we did some research on pre-existing products of the same genre to be able to gain an insight of the typical codes and conventions of the genre. This would allow us to create a product of which the genre would be easily recognisable by the audience and would meet their expecations.

For my Thriller opening, I used a number of websites to obtain information on similar products. Some examples of websites our group utilised are google, imdb, YouTube, wikipedia and more. YouTube was perhaps the most beneficial to our production as we were able to view the actual film openings and trailers which gave us a lot of inspiration. One particular film which inspired us was 'Se7en' which had a very striking film opening, and many of the effects used in the opening ended up as part of our opening as well. From this research I found that in the Thriller film mystery and enigma plays a large factor especially in the beginning of films to draw the audinece in and make them want to watch the rest of the film. This is a feature which I included in the opening as well as the identity of the killer is not clear due to a blacked out screen.

For my A2 production of creating the music video, website and digipack, the same process was carried out as I initially did not know a lot about the Rock/Punk Rock genre. Through researching various music videos including 'Fat Lip' by SUM 41 and 'In too Deep' also by SUM 41, I gathered that the Punk/Rock genre consists of very fast paced shots with swift camera movement and various shot types constantly changing. This helped me figure out how the editing would work and inspired me to take many shots for each segment of the music video during the recording phase. I also researched the band's official website which showed the type of information that needs to be presented and also the designs they use to make their website as professional as possible. I feel like I have greatly increased my skills throughout this A2 production with regards to editing and the camera shots used. Creating a music video is very different to creating a Thriller opening sequence and while both of them are compelx in their own ways, I feel the music video took more effort to create. This is partially due to the large amount of shots used compared to the Thriller opening, as well as the increased variety in shot types which sometimes required many takes to get a result I was satisfied with. I also feel like this production has required me to become more familiar with the software I was using. Both productions were editing using Sony Vegas Pro 10, and to be able to create the music video I had to look at turoails for effects such as the 3 shot transition in the beginning of the video, and the colour tint at the end of the video. Furthermore, this production required many new forms of software which I have not previously seen such as bubbl, xtranormal, pixton, and more.

Overall I feel like many of my skills have greatly improved this year as opposed to last year. Primarily, my organisational skills had to be improved on as this production seemed much more time consuming than last year's, with many different recording days and a schedule for editing, I also feel like my skills with software in general have increasing. In particular, my skills with Adobe Photoshop before this year have been medicore and I relied on inferior software to do image editing. However, this year I felt it would be useful if I become more familiar and ended up doing a lot of practice work which resulted in what I feel are some professioal looking T-Shirt designs on the website.