Digital Technology Essay

Throughout Year 12 media studies, I used digital technologies in much more limited ways than in Year 13. This is reflected in my choice of editing tools, camera and social media usage.

Our first task in Year 12 was to recreate the opening sequence to the 2007 film Juno – this involved attempting to find nearby locations that would resemble the Juno set, finding angles which looked the same and then editing the footage with cuts at the correct times and various effects. While this felt challenging at the time, on reflection it was a minimally challenging task and shows a great contrast to the skills I have now.

Shortly after this, we were put into groups and given a set genre of which we had to make a small video - me and my group created a musical parody of High School Musical.
I was given the role of filming the majority of the video, which we did so on a Sony Handycam provided by the school. I was also solely given the task of editing the video, which I did on Adobe Premiere Pro. This task enabled me to become more comfortable with sound editing and setting sound to video, as one of the largest challenges was faced during editing when I had to cut the music we used exactly in time to our shots in order to make the actors lip-syncs exactly on time. Having little experience of working with folie sound, I initially found this difficult, particularly as some shots were too short for whole song clips to fit in - however I rectified this through using the adjust speed effect on Premiere, so this task enabled me to learn more about both sound and editing.  I also used titles for the first time, which became crucial in our next task.

Our third challenge in media was to create and film the opening to an original movie.
This task involved using higher quality equipment than our previous tasks, with me switching from a Sony Handycam to a Sony Cybershot HX300. This greatly helped in improving the quality of any footage I filmed and heightening the professionalism of the project as a whole, as did making better use of the tripods provided to us by our media department.

Our film opening, titled Panophobia, involved using more effects than previous tasks. Rather than simple jump-cuts and zoom-ins, I applied colour balance and brightness/contrast adjustments to all the footage we filmed, in order to give it the look and feel we wanted. I heightened the blue and green highlight and shadow levels for certain parts, and the red balance for others in order to make it look warmer and give a happier, nostalgic vibe.

For a sequence in which we set fire to disposable camera photos on which our credits were written, I reversed and sped up the footage in order to display our titles. While this was the main way in which we showed our titles, we also had to insert them digitally as part of the task, which greatly improved my skills in layering titles over footage.

Panophobia also lead us to first begin using social media to promote our work – we created a twitter account that promoted it as a real film and tweeted updates as the crew.

Year 13 brought about new challenges, with our first being to replicate the first 30 seconds of a pre-existing music video by an established artist. We chose to recreate “You’re A Germ” by Wolf Alice, which involved using Photoshop in order to create the titles we needed and filming with a high-quality camera, using a tripod and the hand-held method. I applied colour corrections and adjusted the brightness and contrast throughout the footage to give it a clear, high-quality feel and remain similar to the original video in terms of lighting and colour balance. 

Throughout Year 12, I became more comfortable using higher quality cameras, using Adobe Premiere Pro for editing (whereas previously I had been limited to Windows Movie Maker) and using social media as means of promotion. While these skills were limited, they helped to lead me to where I am today.






Introduce your productions at both stages, Juno's tricky editing trick was the drawn animation bit so that highlights to the examiner what the biggest learning challenge was. Paragraph 3 you only get to the point near the end, you won't have time to highlight all your learning at this pace so briefly state your prelim was a high school musical and the post production. P-4 same the intro not necessary get straight to the point of how your skills developed. P6 and 7 fab. I think you're going to run out of time as you will have developed and learnt more in year 13 so you need to write more for A2 skills and development, don't forget your digipak, website and all your presentational skills on blogger too. Let me know when you're ready re-mark.