Section 1A

Digital Technology's Essay
The way in which I used digital technologies in my AS coursework was in the entire creation of my music magazine from the initial planning process, the research and the final construction stages. We initially began the AS course creating a blog on www.blogger.com and I was familiar with this due to using this website at GCSE level. This is where we would display and upload all of our work. The majority of my work would be done electronically and uploaded in various multimedia forms. I found that prezis, powerpoints and videos were the most popular way of uploading my planning, research and final products.
The programs I used to create my music magazine were Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Indesign CS6. I had previously used Photoshop in the creation of our preliminary task of creating a school magazine to prepare us for the creation of our music magazine and to help inspire possible ideas. Therefore I was familiar with using Photoshop to create the magazine as well as edit the photos using various Actions and colour tools. In order to help me understand more about how to use Adobe Indesign, I watched video tutorials online to give me a basic idea of how to work the basic functions such as creating a magazine layout and inserting text boxes and images. Once I had grasped the basics I realised that it's a much better software to use to create the magazine than Photoshop as it was simpler and easy to control all the layers. 
The camera I used to take all my photos was the Canon SLR 550D which the schools owns and I borrowed it for my photoshoot which took 2 shoots. I hadn't used an SLR camera before so I was inexperienced in this department. I had my teacher go through exactly how to use it and change various settings but as I hand't used one before I decided to leave the majority of the settings to default/auto. 
When editing my photos from the shoots I used Adobe Photoshop CS6 and the preset actions were very useful as they gave the photos a vintage sort of effect like the app Instagram and took the edge off of the plain original photo. I then inserted all the edited photos into InDesign and placed text boxes around them. 
Once I had completed my magazine in InDesign I got various feedback from my target audience through the use of video interviews and online surveys using www.surveymonkey.co.uk. 
I then used the website ISSU to upload my magazine and post it on my blog. ISSU is a great programme to use to publish your magazine as when you open it to view it, it flips over like a virtual magazine.
When it came to start my A2 media course I felt confident with the various programmes used last year. However, the main task this year was moving image - a music video. This involved using Adobe Premiere which I was not familiar with and only knew how to import footage. Again, I went online and watched many video tutorials of how to cut up clips, increase brightness and insert lens flares etc. 
I filmed my music video on my own SLR Canon 600D and I experimented more than I did when in year 12 and I altered the settings manually. I changed the ISO according to whether I was inside or outside and how much light was in shot. The darker the frame then the higher the ISO needed to be. This is what got rid of the grainy quality that is seen a lot in footage shot outside especially in the dark. 
When creating my digipak and magazine advert I used Adobe InDesign as I could easily create alternative layouts for the advert - either portrait or landscape and InDesign would reposition everything in the different orientation. 
The photos I initially took for the magazine advert were of a girl spinning across a plane of grass by the use of a reduced shutter speed. This basically allows more movement in the shot and I changed it to around 3 seconds so it captured all the movement made in that time. It worked very well but I decided to make a second advert which was more personal to the artist and something the audience could look at and see the artist. 
For the digipak front cover I used the reduced shutter speed method again but in a light streak format and I took a photo above an A Road with a shutter speed of around 3.5 which looked really effective as on one side the break lights dragged along the lanes and the other side had the white headlights dragged along. The photo is very bright and would immediately attract the audience. 
Overall, I can see a clear distinction in how much digital technology I used in A2 as opposed to the limited technology used in AS and how basic I kept it. In A2 I have been much more experimental with the equipment and software I have used which has proven to give me a very professional-looking end result.