How digital technology influenced my final products

1. How did you use media technologies
in the construction, research and
planning stages?

2. I used technology throughout each stage of the course, even in the
planning and research stages. During this period I used software like
Prezi and emaze to present my work on to the blogger. All of these class
as digital technology as they are digital forms of software used to make
presentation and layout more convenient and better looking. Other
than what I uploaded in the early stages I also used a site called survey
monkey where you are given a template to design your survey and the
choice of where or who you want to send it to, once the responses are
in you can analyse them through the site. It is great if you want fast
responses.

3. In the construction stage I began by gathering the materials needed to form both
ancillary texts and the final product. I did this by taking photographs and filming
with my camera, the Sony a6000. I purchased it in 2016, whilst I was studying
photography and AS media, I found it really useful and wanted to utilise it even
more in the following year, so I made the decision to invest in a 50mm prime lens
to improve the quality of the photography and filming that I would under go. It was
expensive but I was keen to upgrade the standard lens I was using in the previous
year as I wanted the best quality I could get with the money and resources I had
available to me. I believe that the camera benefited greatly from the new lens as I
could now achieve very shallow depth of field with an aperture as low as F 1.8. This
also meant that I could make my shots more neutral so that they could be more
flexible in the edit.

4. When constructing my ancillary texts I used software like Photoshop to create and edit my
digipak and magazine advert. By this point I was really familiar with Photoshop and had
seen a clear progression from using it since first year. What I like about the software is the
unlimited amount of features that you can use to be as creative and experimental as you
wish. Every time I go on, I discover something new and that’s what makes using Photoshop
great, no matter how much time you spend on it you can never have done everything, this
means no one can be a pro at using it. In terms of the photography I featured in my
ancillary texts being on the Photography course helped me to understand composition and
this came useful when editing the images included. The photography course expanded on
what I already knew about the software which made me extremely comfortable with my
capabilities on Photoshop. I couldn’t have seen myself using anything other than
Photoshop to construct my ancillary texts as I had grown my skills through using it. The
tools that I utilised the most were the crop tool, the levels tool and the shape tool. All very
basic tools but ones that if done well can make a massive impact on the quality of the
piece.

5. My final product was the most demanding and time consuming task, I had put so
much thought in to my final product and wanted my hard work to pay off. To edit
both my projection and final product I used Adobe Premiere Pro, it was the
software that I used during the group preliminary task so it was the one I was most
familiar with. I found similarities in the way it was laid out to that of Photoshop and
picked up on where things were located because of this. I utilised the tools
available to construct the edit of the music video in the style that I wanted. Here
are some examples of the editing tools and techniques I used during the process of
creating my video; cutting tool, brightness and contrast, fade to black, scaling tool
and timeline tool.