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, I created an urban film opening for my AS production. In Year 13, I created a music video, website and album cover for my A2 production. To begin with my production I had to research pre-existing products that I could use as an example and to relate to the codes and conventions in order to use them on my production.

In my AS production, for my film opening, I used the Internet to search for different videos that I could relate to and use as an example for my own film opening that I was trying to create. Before deciding what genre to use for our film opening, we decided on a specific target audience which was teenagers and then we decided to make a survey to find out what type of genre teenagers could relate to the best and the specific types of codes and conventions they like in a film. We made the survey on a website called www.surveymonkey.com which was a quick and effective way of creating a survey and getting the statistics of the results. I used the Internet search engine Google to search for different website that can help me find the different synopsis of film openings to get a rough idea of what I would like my product to be like. I used YouTube to find openings of other films, which I could view and see what types of codes and conventions the film has, the different camera angles used to make the film opening affective and attractive for the target audience and the different editing used to make it more professional and attractive. I found that many film openings or trailers were enigmatic which would insure that the target audience would be interested, attracted and engaged to the film as they would want to find out what happens in the film.  I used examples such as Kidulthood and Shank as examples and relation to our music video, the openings had a sense of action and the theme of fighting. We decided to conform to the stereotypical urban opening, with a young teenager coming out a council estate, with the weather being dull and gloomy, with police sirens in the background and quite roads. We also added an enigmatic ending to our film opening trailer to make it more affective and attractive. We used a HD camera to film our film opening and used Final Cut Pro to edit it. We learnt how to use Final Cut Pro on a basic level to sharpen our film opening.

In my A2 production, for my music video, yet again I used YouTube to find different music videos that I could use as examples and relate to for my music video. My group and I collectively decided a specific genre after searching on youtube for different music videos and we decided to go for the urban/funk genre back in the 80’s, making it unique and retrospective. By researching other music videos we also decided what type of codes and conventions we wanted to specifically use for example, skateboards and rollerblades. So I started to research different music videos with skateboards and rollerblades and also videos that had different shot types of skateboarders and rollerblades since we decided that our singer would be on skates. By researching on different types of skateboarding/rollerblading videos and shot types we found a few that we wanted to imitate for our music video, as we found that there was loads of close ups of the main singer to see the different expressions, slow edits to make it effective and close ups of the skates to show it as a symbol for the music videos. Far East Movement’s song “Fly” had certain shows that we wanted to imitate for example, when the guy was on a skateboard and the way they filmed him from the side whilst he was moving fast and the background of people’s graffiti and have a skater atmosphere to show how it was symbolised. We used HD camera again, however, this time we used fish eye camera which allowed us to get footage of what the person sees for example, the viewers would be seeing what the main artist sees. We used Final Cut Pro again to edit our music video, however, this time it was to an advanced level, as we had to sync our lyrics so that it is in time with our main singers lip syncing. We used different colour fading techniques to make the video more retrospective as it would be like in the 80’s. We slowed down a specific shot so that it was in slow motion adding effective to our music video making it more professional.

With creating the website, I used a website called Wix, which was an easy and affective way of creating a website that could appeal to our target audience. On our website as soon as someone would go onto it, we would have our music automatically playing which is good because the person viewing the website would be able to hear the type of song we made our music video to. I didn’t make the website too complicated because it would make it difficult for the audience to use; therefore, I made it easy to use for the target audience. I made the background colour of the website to the colour of what our artist was wearing to make it consistent. However, before creating my website, I looked at other artist’s website to get examples on the way it was represented for the target audience.

For the album cover and digi pack, we got different examples from other artists, for example, for Far East Movement’s album cover they had all their pictures at the front with big bold attracting title making them recognisable, they use a star as a symbol which is effective as it makes their target audience recognise them. For our album cover we used consistent colours which matched our website and also put an advisory logo which many artists have on their album cover to state that people buying it need to be a certain age, this made it more professional and legit. The font used was urban writing which was effective as it makes it recognisable for the audience about what type of genre the music is. We used the front cover as our singer to make him recognisable to the audience.

Throughout my course, through AS to A2 my skills have developed from researching to filming to editing. I believe my editing skills has developed as I didn’t do much editing and didn’t know what to do whilst editing, however, I can now create transitions to make it look effective, use slow motion and change the colours to make it more attractive and professional. I believe that my knowledge of media has also developed in terms of different camera angles, making the production look more attractive and professional.