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 of creating an opening for a Thriller film. In year 13, for my A2 production, I was given the task of creating a music video, website and an album cover. To start working on these productions I had to research similar pre-existing products that I could use as a reference and identify the codes and conventions of these pieces so I could use them and be creative when producing my own.

For my Thriller film opening, I used the Internet to browse websites such as Google and Youtube. I used Youtube to find the opening scenes of other Thriller movies and used Google to find the synopsis of the movie to see the correlation and how the opening would lead into the rest of the movie. Whilst watching these Thriller openings I was able to deconstruct them in terms of their key codes and conventions. The Thriller openings were enigmatic and revealed very little to keep the suspense high and their audiences entertained like Seven. Some used special effects to emphasise the mysteriousness like Charmed and Supernatural. Silence Of The Lambs used the idea of an interrogation theme which was similar to our initial idea. We decided on our film opening revolving around an artefact which added some sci-fi elements and there are not many films from the Thriller genre that involved some sci-fi elements and progressed the film through a series of flashbacks which gave our product a unique edge.

For my music video, website and album cover, I used the same websites as last year; Youtube to find examples of music videos from our chosen genre of Alternative and Google to find other artist’s official websites and album cover images. When researching pre-existing music videos from the Alternative genre, I found that their codes and conventions involved slow edits, close-ups of people expressions, cutaways to make the video more visually interesting, symbolism & enigma and the video went back and forth evenly between the artist/band playing their instruments and the narrative. Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” is an illustrative type music video and I used this idea of relating the lyrics to what you see in my music video when the lyrics “Two to choose” is sung, the video shows the artist attempting to make a choice between two paths which portray his mind-set. In Coldplay’s “Fix You” a member of the band is walking for half of the music video and in “The Scientist” they use a rewind effect and I thought it would be a good idea to combine the two and use them both in our video. This was also an interesting idea because my music video revolves around the artist choosing between two paths so I made the video rewind back to the paths to bring a conclusion to the video and closure for the audience so they know what happened. I feel I have developed my skills when working on this project because music videos have different codes and conventions to Thriller openings as so I got to use new camera angles and experiment with new shots allowing me to be creative with how an audience would view my music video. Instead of being creative with smoke effect credits last year, I got to fade in and out lyrics on-screen in my music video and experiment with different fonts to suit the video. I used filter effects which gave the video a black and white look and am better at synching clips with audio on Final Cut Pro.

For my album cover, I found that Alternative genre albums seem to have abstract pictures with symbolism or simple pictures that don’t crowd the front of the album cover. The album covers that were researched were all popular bands in the Alternative genre which meant they didn’t need to depend on brand and artists awareness but our artist would as he would be a new artist. For these reasons the artist for my music video was placed on the front, back and insides of the album cover. The Oasis “Don’t Believe the Truth cover” was black and white and the track listing on the back is in a simple black font and styled in a cinema title font. The font we used was a simple black font in the style of being written. I was able to be creative with my front cover and use Adobe Photoshop CS5 to edit the album and respond to audience feedback by editing certain parts.

I had never made a website to promote an artist so making a website for this purpose was quite a new experience for me. I had to use the Internet to find official websites of artists from the Alternative genre. James Blunt’s official website had a variety of different components and elements on his webpage but could be confusing for some people, especially people who don’t use computers often and may not be used to navigating such pages. It did have links to Twitter and FB and other social networking pages to keep his fans keep up-to-date with him. The colour scheme was quite plain which I noticed with other websites of artists in the same genre like Coldplay’s website which is black. I wanted to keep my website plain and simple also and to make it link in with the music video and album cover so the homepage had a small introduction and links to Twitter and Facebook and each section has spaced out information. The creativity in the website showed through the different sections of the websites users were able to browse around such as the ‘Store’, ‘Live Events and ‘About Jake Black’ sections.

Throughout the two years of working on these individual production pieces, I feel my editing skills and ability to utilise digital technologies such as Adobe Photoshop and After Effects and Final Cut Pro to get my desired effects. Last year planning was a problem and the product felt rushed. However, this year everything was better planned and things were done efficiently. Research always plays a massive part when working on something where there is already similar pre-existing products because it gives you a foundation to begin from and you can incorporate similar things into your product but at the same time, being creative to make it unique and sellable to your target audience. Audience is very important too when creating a product, as you need to make sure that your product receives good reception from your target audience but also constructive criticism. Without audience feedback, I wouldn’t have known what to change for the better.