1 a) 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.

For AS Media Studies I created a music magazine, and used the site ‘Blogger’ to display all of my work.  Firstly, pre-production of my music magazine text consisted of planning and research, in which I used the search engine ‘Google’ to research existing magazines so I could get a better idea of the conventions I would need to include so that my magazine would be a theoretical success.  An example of these conventions would be the masthead, banner and contents page. I then made several posts on my blog, which helped me pinpoint exactly what I needed to do and what materials I needed to use.  I think using ‘Blogger’ is an easier way of showing coursework as you can skip to a specific date and get what you need. During this process I also researched artists of my particular genre on the music streaming website ‘YouTube’ which helped when deciding what my artist should wear and who they would appeal to. I looked at such artists as Katy Perry and Lady Gaga.

Next, I made a few drafts of what my music magazine might look like, using the programme ‘Photoshop’ and images that I had saved on my computer.  I found this difficult to use and couldn’t get the right look that I wanted; the designs wouldn’t translate onto the actual piece. I believe that my knowledge of ‘Photoshop’ has improved greatly through practice as I now know how to do such things as crop pictures and change the colours, although when constructing my double page spread I would use perhaps Microsoft Publisher as it looks more professional.
Using a friend’s camera, I took a few pictures of a person that was to be my artist in my magazine. In hindsight I probably would have taken more original images as the ones I took were not the clear and did not have the right camera angle and shot that I wanted. Also, the effects I applied to the images made them look unprofessional and did not coincide with the text or colour scheme. I then used ‘Photoshop’ again to arrange my images, cropping them and changing the colour to black and white. I also added text such as a headline, trying to keep to the same colour scheme throughout.
Using LIIAR, I then evaluated my work using Microsoft word, using spell check and word count in the process. I discovered that although I had improved when using ‘Photoshop’ for my preliminary task, my creations still needed some work and I definitely needed more practice.