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. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

I will discuss how my skills in using digital technology contributed to my creative decision making from my foundation portfolio, where we created a two minute thriller film opening and our advanced portfolio where we created a music video of our choice.

Final Cut Express was the main programme that we used to aid us in our foundation and advanced portfolio. The programme allowed us to edit, cut, slow down, speed up and much more to our footage. At first, we had slight difficulties in getting to grips with the programme as we had never used Macs before but after a variety of filming tasks, our experience with the software was slowly increasing. In reference to our foundation portfolio, final cut express helped us to switch around the colour schemes in designated shots. This helped us vastly for our film opening as in doing so, we were able to create a dark and gloomy atmosphere which reflected our sub genre which was a psychological thriller.

Inevitably we were much more confident in using Final Cut Express during our advanced portfolio. This helped us to create out music video as we were exploiting some of the more complex and professional tools that Final Cut was offering. For instance, we created a blur effect which emphasised how drunk the artist was in our video. We did this by overlapping the chosen scene with the same one and starting it by half a second later. We found that this created an effective approach in making our artist look like he was walking while he was drunk as the camera was slightly jerky and was aided by the blur effect which we included.

In our advanced portfolio we also had to complete the ancillary tasks. For this task we had to create a digipak and a magazine advert. We evaluated all of the options to us and concluded that Adobe Photoshop would be the most appropriate programme to use in order to maintain a 'professional' look. We all know how complicated and frustrating Photoshop can be at times but we still decided to go with it. We used online tutorials to guide us in the right direction on how to apply affects and use certain tools. One particular tutorial we watched was explaining how to give your specified image a 'spotlight effect' where it looks as if a shining bright light is shining onto our image (our artist) to emphasise its importance.

Although we still had troubles in using the software in our advanced portfolio it was still a vast improvement from how we used the programme during our foundation portfolio. In our foundation portfolio we decided to use Photoshop to create our film poster to go with our film opening. We took a movie still from our thriller opening and pasted it into Photoshop, there we edited it to give it a more sinister and darker feel to it to put across our sub genre. We did this by making the object in the image brighter and the background darker as we felt that this looked more professional.

Another form of technology that we used was our cameras. We shot both our foundation and advanced portfolio in high-definition. We felt that the cameras helped us as they were easy to use, clear in quality in picking up footage and sound. We felt that these cameras that we used were appropriate as opposed to non-HD cameras as most films are now shot in HD and it also gives us a crisper and more professional look to our foundation and advanced portfolios.

Web 2.0 was integral in our course in decision making, as it allowed us to promote and gain feedback from our peers in large numbers. We found that asking people to watch our video wasn't enough, and decided to post our videos to a numerous amount of social networking sites through YouTube in order to gain feedback and publicity. For our advanced portfolio, we regularly uploaded our music video to YouTube a numerous amount of times as a work in progress to easily post through sites such as Twitter and Facebook in order to receive feedback to make our final product even better. However, during our foundation portfolio it has to be said that we didn't utilise our possession of Web 2.0 as we weren't fully aware of it's capabilities and heavily relied on questionnaires and small scale feedback from close peers. 

Overall, my group and I feel that our experience in using digital technology has vastly improved in making creative decisions as we all feel that our advanced portfolio is better than our foundation portfolio simply due to our experience and knowledge of how to utilise the programmes that we were able to use.