Throughout the completion of the coursework tasks I have used a variety of media technologies in both my construction, research and planning and evaluation stages of the coursework. I believe that in all of the aforementioned areas the use of these technologies to aid me has been both beneficial to my work and helped in the economy process of completing the work, as well as aiding my work to look more professional. Naturally, in the technologically advanced world of the 21st century and with their ever more consistent use in modern day society, the use of computers played a large role in helping me to successfully complete my work. For example, the fact that the coursework has been uploaded directly onto a networked platform of a blog, which in turn can be classed as a social medium and platform in it's own right is merely one example of how technology has had an impact upon my work. It would be no shortage of the truth to say that without Digital Technology some of the executive creative decisions faced by Zach and myself throughout the process would not have proved possible without the existence of specialist software in aiding us to create our work and in turn fulfil our vision successfully.
For example, within the early planning and research stages of this project I made use of video sharing website YouTube to look at and make note of existing examples of Social Realism film trailers and see how the Codes and Conventions had either been successfully applied or, alternatively, subverted for particular effect. For example, I found that Danny Boyle's film Trainspotting, being one of the originating and defining films of the genre was a film that matched very closely the typical Codes and Conventions of the genre that would be expected from an audience. I also used websites such as IMDb to collect and collate research on existing films and see how their marketing campaigns had influenced the films and discovered that increasingly film distributors are making advantageous use of Social Media by which to target their younger demographics, this did not particularly surprise me given the large increase and uptake in social media usage given the advent of Facebook in 2008 and similarly Twitter in 2010. I feel that were our film to be of full scale production we would more than likely use Social Media as just one element of our marketing campaign in conjunction with our trailer and our two Ancillary Tasks.
Similarly, during the planning stages of the project I used internet mindmap planning software/ website "ExamTime" which enabled me to lay out my thought processes effectively, clearly and coherently in a digital format. Use of the internet in general as a digital technology proved effective to me as I was able to view existing examples of posters and film magazine covers for my ancillary tasks and implement into my own work features that I found inspiring, or wished to replicate, such as ensuring that the protagonist of the film was clearly and easily the main focus of the film's promotional poster. Through the use of digital technology I was able to upload handwritten drafted work effectively as a photo into blog posts and integrate these handwritten/drawn elements into the work that had been created purely digitally such as my storyboard.
It was largely in the construction area of the project I feel that we made best use of digital technology as it was within this section of the project that we made use of a video camera to record our footage for our film trailer. This technology, although proving temperamental at times, was of great beneficence to us, as it was through the clear and focussed film quality that we were accurately able to capture the performance our actors were giving. It was in the editing of our work that I got to grips with Imovie of which we had used previously for our AS Foundation Portfolio. As I was experienced in using this technology I felt confident in my ability to navigate the software and co- edit the work with Zach in a collaborative team effort. In the creation of the two Ancillary texts of a film poster and magazine cover, I experienced my virginal experience with photo manipulation software in the form of Adobe Photoshop. Given it's precise nature, this reared up a few difficulties in learning how to use the Software effectively in a short space of time given the precise technicalities associated with the software such as how to overlay text onto images effectively and most importantly learning of the necessity and importance of creating new layers for every new element of a photograph that you wish to manipulate as at one stage I almost lost work due to not having completed this vital task. Not creating layers on my Photoshop image meant that every change I had made was onto the original image itself which, with the benefit of hindsight was not the correct thing to do by any means as this left my work vulnerable and prone to deletion with relative ease had a mistake been made in the photo editing process.
Throughout the course of the Evaluation process of the project the use of Digital Technology has allowed us to reflect effectively on our work and with a critical eye. Indeed one of the best examples available to me is the director's commentary style video Zach and I created detailing the processes involved at various stages of our coursework journey on how we completed our coursework with particular attention being paid to the Construction aspect of the work.
In conclusion, without a doubt Digital Technology has proven to be advantageous to both me and Zach when creating our coursework as without it our work would be by no means as effective and hard hitting as it otherwise would have been without it. In the absence of Digital Technology we would have been consigned to merely planning the tasks, which in the absence of the available Digital Technology, would have been far less pleasurable and certainly by and large, far less rewarding upon completion.
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