DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

Digital Technology allows you to become a creator of your own product and gives you the software to make your product look professional as well as genuine to the audience. It also allows to experiment with elements such as layout, colours and images because you’re able to undo or make changes to your current product. For my AS music magazine and A Level horror trailer, software such as Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Final Cut have allowed me to make these changes. Furthermore, since technology has developed more we have more ways to share and advertise our creations to audiences in any part of the world. For my horror film trailer I am able to share the final product through social networks such as YouTube where it can gain popularity and criticism, which will enable me to know what to improve.

In my AS preliminary task, which was to create a college magazine, digital technology impacted my post production the most. To create the magazine, I used Adobe InDesign to format the text, image and layout. I created boosts using by creating shapes and altering their border and colours. I was able to crop the image so that it was an appropriate size for the page, I was also able to create effects on the masthead such as increasing the shadow and also to change the leading. These skills impacted mainly on my experimentation because when if I increased the leading to much I was easily able to undo it or reduce it. In terms of positioning elements like the boosts I could easily move it around the page which allowed me to see where to place it.

In my AS music magazine my skills developed more because I was exposed to other editing software such as photoshop which helped in the post production. Digital technology in this case allowed me to create work that had a sense of hyper reality for the audience because when using photoshop I was able remove any blemishes on the person of the image and cut out the background to make it more suitable to the genre. Also, prior to this I had already used InDesign to make a final layout for my textual elements such as the cover lines and the masthead and by using photoshop I was able to make final adjustments to the image so that it suited the colour scheme and theme of the magazine. I increased the brightness of the image and the noise so that it had a grainy effect to convey a more masculine feeling (the person was male) and also it allows the brighter colours to stand out.

In my A2 horror trailer my skills were developed further because I had to make use of different types of software and technology during my production stage. During the shooting of our trailer I shot some scenes of the texture shots and disruption and later had to edit them into smaller clips. For the texture shots I used Final Cut to cut the clips into shorter ones and I applied transitions such as fades to black to conform to the conventions of horror teaser trailers. I also added effects to the clips themselves to make them look darker and more mysterious. As a group, we used After Effects for our title cards to create a smoke effect in the background and this has allowed our trailer to look more realistic and eventually when it’s completed we’ll easily be able to share to social networking sites such as YouTube to gain audience feedback.