Digital Technology Essay

Comment on the digital technology you used for your ancillary products and how your skills have developed since AS.

• What are the pros and cons of the software and the hardware at AS in terms of skills development?
• What are the pros and cons of the software and the hardware at A2 in terms of skills development?
• How did you use your AS digital technology skills to aid the construction of your ancillary task at A2?
• What were the pros and cons of developing skills from AS print to A2 video production?

At AS we made a front page, double page spread and contents page for a music magazine. This meant using Photoshop predominantly as well as other technologies throughout the course. I wasn't very confident with using these at first because I had never created anything like this and it was all quite new. The preliminary exercise, though not very advanced, did help me to grasp the basics of Photoshop. For this task I used the schools camera but for my actual product I used my own, a Fujifilm Finepix AV camera. 

The things that I were able to achieve on Photoshop at this point were still very limited. I found Photoshop very difficult to use which initially put me off trying new things. A lot of my time was spent trying to figure out how to use the tools on offer rather than actually using them. I knew that Photoshop was good program and that it was only difficult to use because it was so detailed and there was so much you could do with it but being a beginner I wish I had had more time to build up my knowledge of the program. I think this meant that a lot of the work I did on my music magazine was very simple and I didn't take risks. I very much based my magazine on 'Kerrang!' instead of thinking more creatively and independently. I had the ideas but not the skills to carry them out. 

At A2, because we were creating a music video, we had to use another new program. I had used movie maker before (we also used it for the animatic) but it wasn't as advanced as we would have liked for the music video. At first me and Mae used a program on the PCs which was okay but we never really got to grips with it. We were recommended Final Cut Pro on the Macs which was a better program that was actually quite easy to use. 

Using blogger was a huge part of both the AS and A2 work and was very important for planning and evaluating. It was good to have chronological posts to refer back to when evaluating work and it was also useful to post initial ideas, planning and research for myself as well as teachers. For A2 it made working with Mae a lot easier because we could look on each other's blogs and it was easier to share ideas even if we weren't together. It meant that I could also embed documents from Prezi, Scribd and Animoto and videos from Youtube. All of these technologies were useful throughout AS and A2, enabling me to use a variety of different formats for my blog posts.