Digital Technolgy (unfinished)

For my media foundation portfolio I first created a magazine cover for a school magazine before moving onto my main task which consisted of creating a Music Magazine cover, contents page and double page spread. During A2 I was tasked with creating a preliminary music video prior to my main task which was to construct a full length music video and subsidiary product (digipak). My skills have developed within digital technology over the course due to my exploration of various hardwares and softwares I explored at A2 in comparison to As which subsequently improved my research, planning, post- production, construction and final outcome.

During AS I had a lack of audience feedback because of my lack of software exploration. I depended solely on my blog to receive feedback, and creating an audience survey on a programme called survey monkey. Not having strong audience feedback to work from prevented me from being able to alter my product to audience preference. Along with my lack of audience feedback I also didn’t research existing product perhaps in depth as I could have done. For example, with the preliminary school magazine I tested fonts on Microsoft word, this limited me hugely to mainstream fonts that lacked professionalism and unique style. When moving onto my Music magazine I downloaded a font called ‘Indie Summer’ which associated with the genre of the magazine being indie/alternative. I created my preliminary task on a programme called ‘Pages’ which allowed me to construct my product like existing media products with the use of professional layout. Whereas for my main product at AS I used InDesign which is a professionally used publication designer. I found this easier to navigate and created a higher standard finished product. When manipulating photographs for the magazine I used Photoshop. I was able to use various tools such as colour corrections and Marquee (magic wand) tool. I feel that using the marquee tool put my work at a disadvantage because of my inexperience with photoshop. On our contents page main photograph I edited the photo in black and white then used the marquee tool crop the two models and put them against a solid white background. At AS I feel as though we didn’t communicate properly as a group therefore shoots were disorganised. We communicated via email and in hindsight it would have been more efficient to communicate over instant messenger such as facebook.

With regards to A2 I had now become more confident with using IMacs and adobe programmes. I learned from AS that is was important to ensure I used a range of different software’s to ensure that I maintained professionalism and be more efficient with planning and research. For our preliminary music video we used Imovie. Imovie allowed us to import digital video footage to edit and organise.